We were curious — can you tell the tone of a movie from the hue of a frame, or the amplitude of the sound? We were inspired by previous film visualization efforts like Movie Barcodes, which compress every frame of a film to show the overall hue of the movie. A change of hue in certain films and television shows is integral to the plot — think The Wizard of Oz — and by looking at these visualizations, you can understand tone shifts as the narrative unfolds. By visualizing both hue and sound, we’d like to try and identify key events and tonal shifts without seeing a single frame.

You will need to install the following unix utilities: mplayer ffmpeg imagemagick sox

The script that does the work is main.py. Usage: ./main.py /path/to/movie.avi

It will do processing on the input movie and output a png. We create this color waveform through the sound and amplitude for each frame. To find color per frame, we compress each frame down into a one pixel image, creating the average color per frame. The process is repeated for the entire film.

Included are some examples