Simple Complexity

Cinematic Particles - Movie Dialogue Visualization

This is one of those visualizations that, while it doesn’t provide much insight through it’s unique presentation method, is so unique in it’s design that I find it fascinating.

This project is the brain child of Eva Schindling, an Interactive Media Design Artist. You can see more of her work at her web site.

Film dialog, taken from subtitle files, defines movement and appearance of particles that leave traces on the screen.

You can visit the cinematic particles applet and run your own cinematic particles visualization on any of 32 movies.

Breakfast club (1985)

How it works:

Several particles move across the screen according to their individual acceleration and velocity values.

Smoky watercolor drawings emerge from each movies individual frequency of spoken words and their letters.

Godfather (1972)

Movies that are defined by rapid successions of spoken dialog produce drawings that consist mostly of black ink blobs that grow together, as the particles are constantly reset with new parameters.

Movies that show long silent pauses between scenes gives particles more time to produce long lines and curves. By altering the replay speed of the movie, size and dynamic of the emerging drawings can be controlled.

It’s really worth seeing in motion. You can adjust the speed of the movie script being processed, thus altering how the cinematic particles render their shape. very cool.

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