This Tuesday and Wednesday, DS43’s dashboard challenge involved the IMDB movies dataset. We all had to come up with an avenue to go down that didn’t overlap with other members of our cohort.
My original plan:
-Focus on films in Spanish and Castilian language
-Look at how genre popularity has varied over time
-Do particular actors influence the popularity of genres?
-Do peaks in certain genre popularity correspond with global/political events (e.g civil war)
-Popularity = number of films and average rating
Having come up with this rough plan of analysis, I sketched out some dashboard ideas on excalidraw. I didn't need to do much preparation of this data; I just removed a few fields and changed the Year Release field into a date format.
Then, after diving into the data with not enough regard for the data dictionary, I started looking for insights.
Towards the end of day one, I realised that I’d been treating the data as if every row where Country=Spanish represented a Spanish Film. When looking at the top rated ‘Spanish’ films, The Midnight Express and a few other films which definitely aren’t Spanish appeared, prompting me to revisit the data dictionary and remind myself that each row actually represented the nationality of either actors or directors in the film. Following this, I had to re-jig my analysis slightly and add a filter for Spanish Directors.
Luckily, this didn’t affect my findings too much. I found it difficult to decide which direction to head in despite my original plan due to the structure of the data, but I eventually completed my dashboard asking the questions whether Spain is becoming the ‘New Hollywood of Europe’. I decided on this theme after researching the Spanish film industry and coming across lots of similar articles describing a boom in Spanish films in this way. However, from my analysis of the IMDB data, it doesn't look as though we can consider Spain the new Hollywood of Europe. Yet. Spanish action films might be something to watch.
