Time for a New Look at the Movies through Visualization

Considered an important art form, a source of entertainment and a powerful method for educating, movies have great power to affect us, perceptually, cognitively and emotionally. Technological advances are making a huge amount of movies and related information available. Visualization has the potential to help handling this very interesting but complex richness. In particular, time-oriented visualization could help to capture, express, understand and effectively navigate movies along time: both the time when they were released, or viewed, and the time along which their contents are weaved, in each movie. In this paper, we present our recent work towards the inclusion of the time dimension in 2D and 3D visualizations, based on colors and tag clouds, at the movies space level, and down to the movies in an interactive web application to access, explore and visualize movies based on the information conveyed in the different tracks or perspectives of its content, especially audio and subtitles where most of the semantics is expressed. Our approach has the ultimate goal of helping finding and navigating information through interactive visualizations, and providing insights through analytical tasks or more ludic and artistic uses.