The goal of Frames was to analyze a set of movies and construct a data driven visualization, using the data to create abstract physical forms.

When encoding a compressed movie file, image analysis is done to optimize the quality and file size. The size of a compressed movie file is closely tied to the differences between each frame. The compressed frame sizes can be used to gauge how much change in information occurs frame by frame. A software application was written to reuse this image analysis information, calculating and storing the compressed size of each frame.

Frames presents this data in a two piece composition. A poster printed on vintage graph paper is housed in an procedurally modeled and laser cut acetate shell. The poster presents the analysis of 20 movies. A line segment represents each frame and its compressed size. The lines wander right or left depending on whether the frame sizes are increasing.

The acetate shell presents the analysis of 5 movies represented as 5 rows of 10 points. Each movie is broken into 10 equal length segments, and the largest frame of each segment defines the positions and heights of the points along the movie’s row.

Project created by Dean McNamee at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.