There are some actors that it is very common to see together in the big screen. This might be because exists a great chemistry between them or just because they have a good relationship. Some good examples that came to our minds are Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence or Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
In our dataset we have information on the actors that starred the movies so we aim to explore those acting partnerships. For that, we are going to use a static network. This is a network where the position of the nodes are fixed and can be used to include an extra dimension in our visualization.
For our first designs we only use the 50 most popular actors. The cut was made using the popularity in The Movie Database which is a metric based on the number of daily views or the number of users who marked them as favorites.
Our first try consists of an arc diagram. The list of actors ordered alphabetically is displayed in an horizontal line. Each actor is simbolized with a circle whose size represents the level of popularity. Moreover, the width of the arc linking two actors depicts the number of movies they have worked together. We also made the graph interactive as it is possible to select one actor. In the next image, we can see the actors that have been in a movie with Brad Pitt.
We tried with other layouts and we discovered that using a circle made easier the visualization of the information. In addition, we changed the colour of the actor that is selected to make clear who is the person we are interested in.
Those were the first steps we took regarding network representations. In the next posts we plan to use the position of the nodes to include additional information. One of our ideas is to order the actors by age or by their most genre of films. Furthermore, we will try out with a dynamic network like a force-directed graph to visualize the links between actors and directors.
Links to the gists of the two visualizations:
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