Having no newspaper at hand, I decided to work on the movies selected for the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival, to work with a rather small dataset.

At first I didn't really know what I wanted to investigate (how many of the filmmakers had already been selected for a previous edition of the festival? did the selection differ from those of the previous editions? what movie genres were over-represented? etc.), but as I started working on the dataset it began clear I didn't have to go too far to tell my story!

The women were really under-represented, although the selection committee vowed to include more women in this year's edition...

The Filmmakers of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival - image 1 - student project

My dataset (SO. MANY. MEN!!)

I decided to focus on the age and the gender of the filmmakers to build the visual representation, and I included the length of the movies (y axis) to dispatch them on the page — it was also interesting to see that movies made by men tended to be longer! I also added the previous movies, as they give a glimpse into the filmmakers' careers.

The Filmmakers of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival - image 2 - student project

First drafts and ideas

To create the representation, I built a program on Processing (thanks to your two other amazing classes Nicholas!!), which saved me A LOT of time for the concentric circles and the placement of the dots.

The Filmmakers of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival - image 3 - student project

Tada!!!!

Then I cleaned everything in Adobe Illustrator. I set a minimum opacity of 10% for the largest circles, which I didn't manage to do with Processing (the loop erased them after too many repetitions). I considered leaving the names of the filmmakers but it looked too crowded to my taste...

The Filmmakers of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival - image 4 - student project

And this is the final result! I really enjoyed working on this project and following the class, thank you Nicholas!!! I feel like I learned so much with this class + the ones on Processing!

The Filmmakers of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival - image 5 - student project

Elsa Delmas

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