Our Year of Movies 2020
January 2021
One of the most memorable moments during my first date with my partner was when we gushed over our love of movies. I told him that I used an app called Letterboxd to track the movies that I watched. He perked up, asking if he could see my diary. As he scrolled through, we talked more in depth about films. Needless to say, our shared love was a perfect quarantine hobby during 2020. In such a chaotic year, I thought this would be a lovely data viz that we could both fondly look back.
Type: Static data visualization
Tools: Excel, Sketch
Featured in:
Data Visualization Society’s Information is Beautiful Awards Longlist 2022
The Process
Collecting the data
I downloaded my Letterboxd data which came in multiple CSV files. Even though there were a lot of fields to play with, I added more data from IMDB like genre, Oscar awards won, and length in time to see if there was more interesting information to uncover about our habits (and to also learn in horror how much time we spent in front of the screen). I decided to narrow down the genres to six main ones to make the analysis and design simpler: Comedy, Drama, Family, Action, Documentary, and Horror.
Sketching the visual
One of my favorite data designers that I follow is Giorgia Lupi, one-half of the Dear Data project with Stefanie Posevec. I’ve always admired her colorful and whimsical approach to data viz, which look more like pieces of art compared to a typical computer-generated bar or pie chart.
Inspired by a page from their visual journal, Observe, Collect, Draw!, I visualized the six main genres as color-coded scribbled circles, an extra golden circle for Oscar winners, and dots to signify our ratings. It made sense to create a grid of dots that acted like a yearly calendar: the rows (x-axis) were the months of the year, the columns (y-axis) signified a day of that month (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc), and the dots represented a single day of a calendar year. Then for each day that we watched a movie, I’d circle it in the correct color! I also added the total length of time we watched movies each month on the right side.
If I ever do a second iteration of this, it would be cool to incorporate a way to highlight female-directed movies.
Designing in Sketch
One of my favorite tools is Sketch. It was introduced to me when I took a few weeks of UX design courses. I’d imagine it’s a good substitute for Illustrator but someday I’d like to afford the real deal 😎
For the color palette, I was again inspired by Giorgia Lupi’s work at Accurat. More specifically, the “Nobel no degrees” visualization from their La Lettura series caught my eye. The rainbow of slightly-muted colors against a sand-colored background seemed to be a more natural fit for my playful and personal project.
What I Learned
We almost had an inverse bell curve of the amount of time we spent watching movies. We started high during the spring since we didn’t know much about COVID-19 and we felt it was best to stay inside as much as possible. Then in July and August, we went on summer adventures like hiking, camping and road trips. Thankfully, we spent less time in front of the screens. October and December saw another spike in movie-watching because of house-sanctioned movie marathons that revolved around Halloween (see all the orange horror movies?) and the holidays (see all the green family movies?).
I’m really happy with how this turned out! I’m so used to pulling dashboards for work or redesigning presentation decks for clients, which usually involve a lot of business-type charts. That can get boring. This was the first time I wanted to try a completely different approach and I’m so glad that Giorgia Lupi came to my mind when I started sketching this out. I’m looking forward to more projects where I can explore unconventional data visualizations 😊The circle doodles look so imperfectly adorable to me! Glad to say my partner loved it, too.