This week’s brainstorm was one of the hardest projects I’ve ever had to think about. It took me an extremely long time to figure out 1 topic let alone 2 different ones that I think I could research well enough to make a comprehensive visual data narration.
After reading Visual and Statistical Thinking, I began to think about the importance of taking a well organized data set and making it something interesting and visually appeasing. The author talked about the need of taking the information and instead of just listing out the data or describing it, to actually show it and make a comparison.
“Instead of plotting a time-series, which would simply report each day’s bad news, Snow constructed a graphical display that provided direct and powerful testimony about a possible cause-effect relationship. Recasting the original data from their one-dimensional temporal ordering into a two-dimensional spatial comparison,” (Tufte 30).
With this in mind I thought about a topic that would have a strong comparison. This led me to think about the industry that I want to go into after completing grade school, which is mainly film and entertainment. When thinking about the film industry the biggest comparison is between high budgeted blockbusters versus smaller independent films. After thinking about how strong of a comparison that I would be I began to think about what smaller data visuals and graphs I could create to show the difference between the two types of films.
This led to me writing down all the different aspects that go into film making, which included the budget, costumes, sets and props, caliber of actors, theatrical or non theatrical release, and marketing/publicity leading up to the release of the film. After thinking about all of this data Tufte’s description of the difficulty of sifting and processing a large quantity of data.
“It is easy now to sort through thousands of plausible varieties of graphical and statistical aggregations – and then to select for publication only those findings strongly favorable to the point of view being advocated. Such searches are described as data mining, multiplicity, or specification searching” (Tufte 37).
For this particular narrative I would have to mine data that was very recent. The entertainment industry makes leaps and bounds in progress everyday so data from many years ago would be useless to the narrative unless it was to show the progress and changes that blockbusters and indie films have made.
Within this narrative I’m choosing to go for a very old time Hollywood feel. The red curtains the film reels, everything in bold and that black, white, red and yellow color palette. I also think using logos and icons to my advantage in all of the visuals, like movie theater logos, and small graphics from large well known films, will not only serve as great technologies to help tell the story visually but it will also help convey the info and message to my audience. I had explained in my original project breakdown that the audience for this particular project could feasibly be anyone, but if you were to get more specific it would definitely be film enthusiasts and creative story lovers. In the presentation this week on Storytelling and Visual Cues, the general audience views the narrative for the overview will the expert audience, in my case the film buffs, will want to explore more of the data in an in depth way.
“Expert audience members require less storytelling and will likely want more opportunity for detailed exploration and discovery”.
The original plan for this narrative is to visualize all the building actions as different pieces of the industry so the viewer can see a comparison not only between blockbusters and indies film’s profits, but also a comparison of every aspect included in them.
The other idea I had come up with for this narrative project was the increase or decrease of COVID cases in beach towns during the summer. It’s a very hyper specific idea so the data would be a smaller set to mine through, but I also fear that there might not even be enough data to create a well informed visual narrative in the first place. I had spent far more time curating info for the first idea versus this one so it’s not as well planned out, and while I find both very interesting, I think my first idea will captivate more audiences and will make a better story that has a surprising and long lasting takeaway at the end.
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