Quentin Tarantino's Films
MAT 259, 2016
Yan Kong

Concept

In this project, I'm still trying to explore the potential to visualize data about Quentin Tarantino's nine Films. This time I'd like to emphasize each movie as an individual integrity. And in order to visualize it in 3D space, I introduce the number of formats each movie has, in terms of item types for each movie.

Query

MySQL code is the same as project 1.

Preliminary sketches

I was inspired by the solar system. Every planet represents a movie. And this planet is built via data distributed along longitude and latitude. For latitude, I exhibit the number of formats this movie has in SPL, in terms of item types. And for longitude, I display checkouts per year, from 2006 to 2016. The spinning speed of each planet shows each movie's total checkouts.




Process

I tried different methods to visualize my data, to generate the planet. First, mapping one single movie's data to a spherical coordinate system and connect each vertex:


Or simply connecting data for one certain form:

Or finding a polygon to wrapping the whole data:

Or only connecting the points which generate the max polygon:

None of them seemed to be satisfied. After a lot of attempts, I decided to map my data based on a fixed sphere, thus those points can always generate a convex polygon.

In fact, I have to admit that this kind of data is not suitable for mapping to a sphere. The number of item types for visualizing in longitude is too small. A few movies only have one item type.

Final result

My final result is shown below. It's not satisfying as I expected, but I did enjoy exploring and pushing the limit during the process.


UI is added. By clicking each planet, it will jump to the chosen planet with a spherical coordinate system and you can get a better view for each planet. When zooming out, it will return to the planet system with spherical coordinate system fading out.


Code
All work is developed within Processing
Source Code + Data