Entertain Me!
Made by Judy H
Made by Judy H
The topic I chose to visually represent was the amount of money that production companies spend to create movies along with a comparison of their return on investment. The reason I chose this topic is because my brother is a walking factsheet on various movies and he would always tell me how large the budget was for a particular movie and I would always be shocked at the amount of money that was put into producing that movie. I wondered whether people were aware of how much money is being spent in the entertainment industry in creating movies and how much of this entertainment culture we as movie-goers are feeding into.
Created: September 16th, 2014
The topic I chose to visually represent was the amount of money that production companies spend to create movies along with a comparison of their return on investment. The reason I chose this topic is because my brother is a walking factsheet on various movies and he would always tell me how large the budget was for a particular movie and I would always be shocked at the amount of money that was put into producing that movie. I wondered whether people were aware of how much money is being spent in the entertainment industry in creating movies and how much of this entertainment culture we as movie-goers are feeding into.
I still like this project! I also like the idea of hosting it in abandoned movie theaters, which seems a powerful statement of the increasing budget. I also like the two mounds idea, which evokes the idea that, yes, money was spent, but look, here's all this ROI. This is a good project with room for interesting developments (Maybe organization of the various movies could be tweaked to show more successful ones or older ones first?).
I think it was smart to represent an easily accessible and quantifiable set of data in an interpretive way. The choice to represent this data through the scale of physical objects is unique among the other projects in the gallery, and makes for a more arresting illustration of your subject than numbers or graphs. I like that you thought about the context of the presentation and chose a setting (abandoned movie theaters) that adds another dimension of meaning to the project. I wonder if the piece would be easier for the user to understand if the objects you use to represent the data were more uniform? Or perhaps it's more interesting if all the objects are different, but I still think you'd have to give some more thought to the logic behind the choice of objects. A cohesive and comprehensive logic in this regard will make the visual representation much stronger and easier to understand.
Well done! This is a really nice approach to creating an embodied representation of a cultural form - cinema. Making the scale of a movie's budget proportional would give the visitors a very different sense of what it might take to produce a modern blockbuster.
As an alliterative to the timeline approach - showing the increasing cost over time - might you alternatively choose a single year and select different genres of successful movie - action, drama, comedy, scifi and perhaps an indie movie. That could show the disparity in budgets equally strongly.
As another consideration, what are the other dimensions that might get someone to reconsider the production of a film? For example, an easy data point to collect might be the number of people involved in a production - by culling the list of credits.
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