As part of the #MakeoverMonday series, I revisited a Slow Journalism article about the career of the late actor Alan Rickman. While the original viz was data-heavy and maybe a little overburdened with encoding of values, I decided to bring more of an audiovisual element to the remake.
I scoured YouTube for clips (as family-friendly as possible, although that didn't turn out to be doable in every instance) that highlighted Mr. Rickman's performances in each of his movies. After gathering that data, I used Tableau's capability for encoding videos in a floating window to create the appearance of a movie theater within the viz itself.
For the data, I wanted to make sure that users could click on each of the movies, while interacting with the chart, but I also wanted at least a few of the most pertinent dimensions to be readily apparent. So, with that in mind, I chose a lollipop chart on a timeline, with the vertical axis representing the Rotten Tomatoes rating of each movie, the size of the bubble representing the adjusted gross, and the color of the bubble representing the number of theaters in which the film opened. (Side note: I went with lollipop rather than strict bubble chart because the smallest bubbles are hard to find sometimes, and because I wanted a drop line to tie those bubbles to the year on the timeline in which the movie was released.)
The resulting viz can be found here: https://public.tableau.com/views/CelebratingAlanRickman/CelebratingAlanRickman?:embed=y&:display_count=yes
As an additional challenge to myself, I made my first attempt at using Tableau 10's ability to customize the viz for mobile devices. I had to drop some of the movie-theater metaphor and adjust a few other things, but I believe the functionality and the basic soul of the viz are maintained. Here's how that worked out:
It was an enjoyable Makeover Monday to tackle, and it was good to get some practice in with the Device Designer and with embedding media files in the dashboards themselves.