The Colour Of Movies, Visualised

The Colour Of Movies, Visualised


These images are called spotmaps: each coloured square represents the average colour from one second of a movie, and that process is repeated the whole way through the film. Can you guess which movies are shown above?

The images are a result of the ongoing Spotmaps project by Andy Willis, who aims to construct these colour blueprints for a whole heap of movies. So far, he’s worked his way through 296, reaching all the way back to 1923.

The films are processed using Python, and then the result are plotted so there are 60 data points on each line: each row is a minute of film, and the vertical height represents the length of the film in minutes. You can take a look at the rest of the spotmaps over on Willis’s website.

Oh, and if you’re still wondering, the films shown above are Avatar, Looper and Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, in that order. [Spotmaps]