"Movie Narrative Charts -xkcd"
For this week's reflection, I decided to return to xkcd, with a visualization I remember seeing a while ago. It's a fairly simple concept showing character interaction throughout the span of a movie or series. I like this data viz because it's a fun concept but it's also very easy to read and understand. It doesn't show all that much information but at the same time, you can get a sense of the whole story by just seeing the characters' interactions and highlighting some major details. Looking through the Star Wars trilogy I'm able to tell where the movies blend into one another and it's interesting to see how characters that are integral to the story and have become major icons didn't interact many times with the main group (Vader and Yoda). There are a couple of jokey ones like 12 angry men where the jurors don't leave the room and primer where god knows what is going on, but in all seriousness, I very much admire this visualization. Even in the graph for the lord of the rings franchise. I haven't seen any of the films but I'm still able to understand the timeline and read the graph even if it seems like it might be overwhelming. I especially like the visual aspects added to the chart. Like the orcs, since they're not just one person they show up as more of a mass with tendrils, and that not only helps to sell that the orcs are an entire army, but also the personality of their army as well.