Actors Working in Teams [infographic]

Sometimes I’ll start a data project, and duing the process one of several things may happen:

I lose interest
something more important comes along
I realized it’s just not “working”

The latter happened as I was working on a piece for the latest Information is Beautiful challenge – which involved chomping through a large and very interesting data set regarding Hollywood movies.

These challenges encourage you to use a data set provided by the website to create either a visualization, napkin drawing ( sketch) or an interactive piece.

After several hours of looking through the data, looking for interesting angles, and hunting for more data I could add to the set (via Google Refine) I settled on looking at the connections between the actors involved in the top films.

Ask anyone who’s watched a film with me and they’ll tell you that I have a VERY annoying habit of opening Wikipedia to find out where I’ve seen a particular actor before. It’s annoying in everyday life, but for this – it was a dream.

I was also intrigued by the success of the films starring Seth Rogen / Jonah Hill et al, and the idea of teams working together – and how prevalent this was across other areas of Hollywood.

(see below for more details and why I eventually shelved it)

What it Means

Yes, it’s a bit of a headache isn’t it? The original dataset with featured the films coming out of the major studios, over a certain time period.

I added actor information to the cataset from Freebase (within Google Refine) and worked out which ones had appeared in the most films over the time period. I then cross referenced the films and created the above chart.

I had originally intended to give each film a different colour but this became unworkable – so I limited the colours to the films featuring 3 or more actors on the chart. The rest I coloured in grey.

Why It Didnt Work

For one, it was too damn complicated – no chart should take 3 paragraphs to explain. Kinda defeats the point, right?

Secondly, the choice of resulting entries was nonsense.

Original Data (limited to major studios)
Actors added to each film (according to Wikipedia, via Freebase)
Top 26 hardest working actors selected (based on original list, so ignoring independent or smaller budget films)

And thirdly – it didn’t really say anything. I always put the success of my last Information is Beautiful entry down to the quirky subject matter (comparing the lifespan of important earth resources to celebrities). This didn’t have that element. Yes, it was interesting to see which actors work together, but the dataset was too limited to show any major patterns.

I eventually decided to stop working on the design (hence a few wonky areas) and shelve it.

So why am I publishing it here?

Because I spent all day on it, I like the IDEA and design and I wanted to share my experiences of when to walk away.

I’d love to hear your experiences of when you’ve had to walk away – and why.