Film Dialouge Broken Down by Gender and Age

polygraph.cool

34 points·kamkazemoose··6 comments

A great visualization! And it is great that the authors provide links to the movie scripts (I think I will use these for another movie visualizations).

The only qualm is the scrolling - I would really prefer to have these visualizations being separate and scrolling behave normally. Sure, I understand it looks cool and fashionable, but (at least for me) its really distracting.

When it comes to the good stuff - I like the most the last feature, when one is a able to search for movies and look at characters (sometimes movie is "male" or "female" due to protagonist... or the mentor character, which very often have more lines).

For actor ages - a nice pick (I think it is highly related to the viewers' preferences - vide http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woma...).

How was this measured?

The article says "number of lines", but wouldn't time or words be a better measure?

If I understand correctly, the way that a screenplay is formatted takes care of all three simultaneously. The font is monospaced and the text size, margins, and line spacing make one page of dialogue pretty close to one minute of time.

This was omitted from the piece, but we count words and then convert to lines at ~10 words/line. When pop culture talks about dialogue in film, we use lines. So that felt more natural than "# of words spoken."

One thing the article could mention, which is apparent from the last graphic, is that there is a slight trend towards improving the gender balance.

This was a great read, and the charts were very fun to interact with.

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