Jermain and Michael are co-founders of a data visualisation project called ‘Moviegalaxies‘, “a place to discover the social graph in movies”. I recall I saw an early version of this project last year but it seems that the depth of movies now available has grown significantly.
The project essentially enables you to search through a catalogue of (currently) 775 movies and explore a network graph of the characters and their relationships within each film. As the founders describe, “beyond the story and actors of a movie, the interactions and relationships among actors play an important role in how movies are perceived.”
Once you select a movie you can browse through the characters, with a fish-eye feature zooming in on your current view. You can select and isolate an individual character and see the specific connections.
It is particularly interesting to explore movies that you already have a familiarity with in terms of structure. For example, compare the parrallel story structure of Babel with the multi-character epic Casino.
As the developers express this experiment is driven by a mixture of uncertainty and curiosity and I love that they have added a ‘wish list‘ feature to the site to collate ideas for future developments. This approach would be great if it was incorporated into many more self-initiated projects like this.