Design of Interactive Visualizations of Movies in Space and Time

Abstract

Considered an important art form, a source of entertainment and a powerful method for educating, movies have the great power to affect us perceptually, cognitively and emotionally. By integrating various symbol systems like image, audio, and text over time, they are very rich. Moreover, technological advances are making a large amount of movies and related information available over the years, and these media are increasingly being created, shared and accessed from different platforms and devices, supporting georeferencing as a form to further enrich their context, in time and space. However, the richness that makes these movies so interesting and accessible comes with a challenging complexity, highlighting the need for new and powerful ways to access, browse, and view them. Current navigation, search and access to movies happen mostly based on limited types of information, the applications that explore movies and videos do not fully exploit this potential due to the few dimensions they handle. Therefore, more and richer criteria of search, along with interesting and ludic visual aids are needed in order to help the user to manage and access this large amount of complex information. Interactive visualizations can help to handle this challenge. Through a Practice-Based Research, and by following a set of systematic fundamentals of design, we provide new and easy ways to explore, navigate and access movies through spatiotemporal interactive visualizations that allow for both professional and ludic uses. Accordingly, we focus on the exploration of information about movies released over time, in a certain location (e.g., movies of the Drama genre that were released in 2011, in France), and the information that is waived in the contents by criteria such as those related with image, audio, speech, with a focus on emotions (e.g., colors, music mood, spoken words and the emotions felt by the viewer). We validate the design through an evaluation that had positive and encouraging results, and showed the strengths and weaknesses of the visualizations and, above all, contributes to the refining towards improved proposals.