Visualizing A Movie's Color Footprint

In the average movie, you’re pretty much guaranteed that it’ll run through a whole range of colors. If you were to sit there and note them all down, you’d probably die of boredom before you got to the end. But thankfully, if you did want to note the color spectrums of different films, you can let technology do the hard work.

Andy Willis’ Spotmaps project processes movies through Python and OpenCV software to create color maps from them. He samples each second of film to produce an average color from the frames in that period, which then becomes one of the 60 colored spots which make up the lines of each image—with each line representing a minute of film. The result is a pixelated grid of changing hues that show the color footprint of different movies. So far he’s done 296.

And you’d have to be a very keen movie fan (like, very keen), to be able to tell what the film is just from its spotmap.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Avengers

Don’t Look Now

Drive

[via Gizmodo

@stewart23rd