Exploring movies through interactive visualizations

Abstract

Videos and movies are important sources of information in the entertainment and learning form, having great power to affect us, perceptually, cognitively and emotionally. By integrating various media like image, sound and text along time, they are very rich and they are becoming pervasive on the Internet and interactive TV, increasing the need for new and powerful ways to access, browse and view them. Interactive visualization techniques have the potential to help handling with this rich but complex information: both the time when they were released, and the time along which their contents are weaved, in each movie. In previous work we have presented visualizations that allow the access to the movies released over a certain period of time based on genres and rankings, and to overview and browse movies based on their contents represented with tag clouds. In this paper, we explore the movies through visual representations of the different aspects of their contents, especially image, audio, and subtitles, with a focus on emotions. This approach has the ultimate goal of providing overviews, and browsing mechanisms based on interactive visualizations that may provide insights in analytical or more ludic uses, that may be efficient in conveying and accessing information, and are also easy, funny and aesthetical.