Let's Make Movies - A Lumira Visualization Extension Sample

[Terry_Penner]

The Infographic extensions in this series can be found at

1. Let's Make Movies

2. Economy and Environment

3. Frequent Flyers

Let's Make Movies

With the Oscar awards in early March, it's a good time to look at trends for winners of the Best Picture award.  By combining the storytelling features of SAP Lumira, data from boxofficemojo.com and a visualization extension, we can look how release dates affect Best Picture winners, and also how much box office revenue Best Picture winners take in compared to other movies that year.

Sample code, source data and saved Lumira files are all included at the bottom of this posting.  Thanks to Xing Jin at SAP for helping update the sample to the latest version of Lumira, and to Sebastian and Kelly from the IBM Lab for SAP Solutions for developing the code and visualizations.

Release Dates

Let’s first take a look at the trend for release dates of Best Picture winners. Traditionally, award winning movies have been released in December. However, when we look at the grouped chart it is noticeable that in more recent years, this trend is not as strong. Recently, best picture winning movies have been more evenly distributed across the months from May to December.

1. Best Picture Winners by Decade viewed as a stacked bar chart.

December is still the most common release month, but in more recent decades the trend is not as strong.

2. Best Picture Winners by Decade viewed as a grouped bar chart.

This visualization extension allows us to toggle back and forth between the grouped and stacked view using the radio button in the top left of the visualization.

Best Picture Gross Revenue

The second trend we’ll look at is to compare the gross revenue for Best Picture Winners compared to the average movie gross during the same year of the premiere.  When looking at movies from 1982 and later using a Tree Map created in SAP Lumira, we can see at a glance that the only movies bringing in significantly more revenue than the average are Titanic, Forrest Gump and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Of those three movies, Titanic is by far the biggest box office winner compared to other Best Picture Winners.  Looking at the rest of the data, we can safely say that winning the Best Picture award doesn’t mean the movie will also win at the box office.

Presented as a Story

Using the SAP Lumira “Compose” view, we can place both of these visualizations on the same page, add an attractive background image, a title and some text.  The visualization extension in the top left allows some additional basic interactivity within the compose window.

Source Material

Source code, sample data and completed Lumira visualization file are available here.

Deployment instructions:

1. Download and Unzip 'MovieSample.zip' into a temporary directory.

2. Copy the “Let’s Make Movies.lum” file into the “My Documents\SAP Lumira Documents” folder

3. Unzip stackgroup.zip into C:\Program Files\SAP Lumira\Desktop\extensions, so your folder looks similar to the picture below:

4. Open SAP Lumira and open the "Let's Make Movies" document