Grad student Frederic Brodbeck created quite possibly the most amazing project in the history of cinema. It’s called Cinemetrics and instead of trying to paraphrase what it is, I’ll let Fred give the lowdown:
Cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.
Probably the most notable comparison was between Aliens and 2001: A Space Odyssey – it was like looking at a petri dish of bacteria or DNA through a microscope.
Probably the funniest fingerprint was the porn one, which was a flesh colored pentagon-ish shape that looked like it was pulsing/throbbing. If that’s not a telltale sign this visualization hit the nail on the head, I don’t know what is. It’s also a call to arms for porn producers to get a little more creative and/or elaborate with their releases? Heh, I said, “releases”.
You can buy Frederic’s posters here.
[Via Laughing Squid]
Neal Lynch 