Money and the Oscars

Amartya Sengupta




MAIN MOTIVATING QUESTION: How does money earned from or spent on a movie correlate to success at the Academy Awards?

SPECIFIC QUESTIONS:
• How has the (relative and absolute) relationship between budget and Oscars won changed over the last 30 years?
• How has the (relative and absolute) relationship between box office performance and Oscars won changed over the last 30 years?
• What is the breakdown of these two relationships in specific years?

I chose these questions because of my interests in both movies and economics. I have always enjoyed watching Oscars, and in recent years I have tried to intuitively understand whether big budget, big earning movies (Lord of the Rings, Titanic) perform better than small budget, small earning movies (Amadeus, Gandhi). Now I would like to visualize those trends to better and more accurately understand them.


DESIGN AND FEATURES:
In short, there is a set of filters on the left side that alters the charts represented in the middle. The middle charts can either be a trend over time or a combination of trend over time and a breakdown of a selected year.
My goal with this visualization was not to analyze the data and present one solution, but to give the user a nimble tool with which to explore the data himself or herself (like the Baby Name Wizard).

Filters
• Oscar category – All Categories, Major Categories (Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director), or Specific (every possible category). Clicking on one of these will show the data for just that category. Note that which category is selected changes how the chart data is calculated. For example, if All Categories is selected, the “Winning Budget Over Time” chart will show the average winning budget for all winners over time. If instead one of the specific categories is selected, the chart will show the budgets of the actual winning movies for that category over time.
• Calculation Method – Absolute values or Relative values (relative to mean of the top 100 movies of the year)
• Economic Category - Budget or Box Office Returns.
• Trend Line – the user can request to see a trend line on the main chart as well as the mean of the trend.

Additional Interaction
• Requesting Year Details – clicking on a data point on chart will bring up a detailed view of that year
• Requesting Movie Information – hovering over a data point in any of the charts will give more information. If the data point is a movie, you will find more information about the movie. If the data point is an aggregated data point of several movies from a particular year, you will find out more information about that year at the Oscars.
• Linking/Brushing – the data and legend in the detailed chart are linked



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Source code: FinalProject DrawDetailGraph DrawMainGraph DrawMenu Helper_Functions Interaction Object_Classes Table

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