Cinemetrics

Categories Graphic Design, MoviePosted on

The idea

Cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.

The tools

Extracting, processing and visualizing movie data is something you cannot do manually, that’s why custom software tools were written for pretty much every step of the process. – Tools for disassembling video files into their components (video, audio, subtitles, etc.) and processing them (shot detection, average shot length, motion measuring, color palettes), as well as an interactive application to generate and compare different movie fingerprints.

The posters

The accompanying poster series shows the most important steps of the process. It explains where the data comes from, what techniques I have been experimenting with to analyze and process it and how a typical data set of a movie looks like. There is a diagram that shows how a movie fingerprint works and why it looks the way it does, an overview of all the movies I analyzed, and it features three other experiments of how a movie could be visualized in one image with different levels of abstraction.

The book

The process book is a more in-depth summary of my work. It contains the exposé, a description of my approach, the results of my research, early sketches and intermediate stages of the project and an inventory of the final results.

Cinemetrics by Frederic Brodbeck.

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