Last week’s print version of New York Magazine featured a flow chart graphic to assist readers in choosing the summer action movie that best suits their preferences. The interactive, online version is available here. Continue Reading →
Today’s MOTD comes to us from designer David Honnorat and his blog Vodkaster. In the easily recognizable style of a Metro map, David artfully creates 16 track lines (genres) and maps the top 250 movies along them as stations. The other thing David does is try to create junctions between genres at specific crossover movies. For example, you can ride the comedy line to the Forrest Gump junction and either continue on with comedy or transfer to the movies about tolerance line (both major themes in Forrest Gump). See what other fun connections you can find!
Today’s MOTD is a very interesting and impressive map charting all of the associations that the original creators of Star Wars have had throughout the years in the categories of games, sound, films and special effects.
Today’s MOTD is the coaching tree of the creator of the west coast offense and one of the greatest coaches of all time Bill Walsh.
In analyzing the tree, Mike Holmgren’s lineage is probably the strongest but Dennis Green’s tree is making a case bolstered by the most current super bowl winning coach, Mike Tomlin.
Being a huge Star Wars fan, I had to post this Galaxy Map as the MOTD to make it a little easier for people to understand where the planets are aligned in the galaxy.
Envisioned by Todd Holloway, this graphic is based on the Netflix Prize activities, which is a project focused on improving the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their preferences.
The dataset was 17,700 movies and 31 gigabytes of user ratings. Holloway references the large red mass to be “junk movies”, which, when labeled as such, proffers an intriguing statement on not only quantity of quality films being produced, but also the challenge of promoting movies to the correct market segment.
An interesting thought would center around the manner in which movie promoters and distributors, like Netflix, are defining their market categories. This evidence in this visualization begs the questions of whether or not movie market segments ought to be defined with a more broad set of criteria than is currently being employed.
Todays MOTD comes to us from accomplished infographic designer Paul Horn. I decided to showcase one of his lighter comic based works and offer a link to his comic strip/webpage, here.
The infographic tells you everything you need to know about Spider-Man, his abilities and his origins. The section about how his web slinging is actually produced by a gadget unlike the movies.
Today’s MOTD focuses mainly on the comparison of top box office figures versus the most illegally download movies. The graphic also provides information about the websites used to download the movies, as well as a few general figures and facts. It’s not surprising that the “Ill wait for it to come out on DVD” movies are the most downloaded.
I also found it interesting that Mininova.org was the most used torrent website. In light of all of the recent PirateBay prosecution, one would think that they would top the list. Mininova, on the other hand is still healthy and thriving. Different laws in Sweden than the Netherlands i guess. (Please comment if you know)
Another statistic that caught my eye was that 47 billion dollars worth of software was pirated. You don’t hear too much from the software industry about piracy because they like to try and outsmart the pirate. They would rather shell it out than admit they are wrong or ‘out gunned’, while the RIAA is disproportionally vocal.
Today’s installment of MOTD hails from CartoonBrew.com, and depicts the processes and pathways for a given Disney flick from the brain of Walt himself, to the viewing audience in theatres.
Pay attention to the use of different shapes to denote varying types of information — an impactful representational style to distinguish the key story elements within a graphic.
I found it particularly interesting that there seems to be just as many support groups / functions as there are creative steps in the process. One could deduce from this type of view that the production and management activities are equally as important as the ‘creative’ process.
Created by TrendONE / BVDW Virtual Think in Germany, this infographic shows a the history, current state, and future projections for the increasingly merged worlds of gaming and film. Worth a read through for those of you who are into either!
Oz is an imaginary magical monarchy, first introduced in L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). In all, Baum wrote 14 childrens’ books about Oz, presenting himself as the ‘Royal Historian’ of Oz. After his death, Ruth Plumly Thompson continued the series. Using clues in the series, fans have drawn up maps of Oz.
The Land of Oz is rectangular in shape, divided along the diagonals into four counties:
Munchkin Country (east)
Winkie Country (west)
Gillikin Country (north)
Quadling Country (south)
In the centre is Emerald City, the capital and seat of Princess Ozma. Oz is completely surrounded by deserts, insulating the country from invasion and discovery. The isolation may be splendid, it is not total: children from our world got through, as well as the Wizard of Oz and the more sinister Nome King. To prevent further incursions, Glinda created a barrier of invisibility around Oz.
Peculiar on some maps is that west is right, while east is left (while north is still top and south bottom). Some say this is because Baum looked at the wrong side of a glass slide while copying the map. Others believe the reversed compass rose simply reflects the ‘confusing’ nature of Oz, possibly due to Glinda’s spell. The reversal of east and west makes sense in that the Wicked Witch after enslaving the Winkies was called the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ even though Winkie County is on the right hand side of the map. Robert A. Heinlein claims in his book The Number of the Beast that Oz is on a retrograde planet, spinning in the opposite direction of Earth.
Oz is the largest country on the continent of Nonestica, which also includes the countries of Ev, Ix and Mo (also known as Phunniland). Nonestica lies in the Nonestic Ocean – possibly a local name for the Pacific Ocean. In fact, some hints indicate that Oz is in the South Pacific: there are palm trees and horses are non-native. In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy is sailing to Australia when she is washed overboard and lands on the shores of Ev. Intriguingly, Oz is commonly used to refer to Australia, which borders the South Pacific Ocean.
The origin of the word ‘Oz’ is uncertain. One story holds that L. Frank Baum took it off a filing cabinet, which was divided into two alphabetical drawers: A-N and O-Z. Another holds that it is a corruption of Uz, the biblical homeland of Job. It could also be a reference to ounce (abbr. oz.) – with the story of Oz being an allegory for the populist struggle against the gold standard (personified by the powerless, frightened wizard in the books).Other theories state that ‘Os’ is and old English word for God, and in Wicked, a clever parody on the Oz material, it is proposed that Oz derives from ‘oasis’ or ‘ooze’, being a reference to the creation legend of a great flood.
