The average color of every frame of a given movie, compressed into a single picture. [OC] (x-post from r/movies)

Wow, I kinda want a printed version of my favourite movie framed on my wall.

Finding Nemo is much less blue than you'd think

I was inspired by the Movie Bar Codes posted to reddit earlier, and wanted to write a program that creates a cleaner final product focusing solely around color choices. I created this program using Processing to code it in Java. Instead of compressing full frames into single lines, my version compiles it by the average color of each frame. (Longer movies have overlapping lines to fit in the same dimensions.) The result is a smooth spectrum of color that I think turned out pretty great!

If you've got any suggestions for movies to use, let me know. I'm also posting my favorites to my online portfolio - if you're interested check there as well for new movies!

Wow, thanks for all the positive feedback! Since so many people asked, I made some full-size renders available for print at http://www.artpal.com/filmspectrum. Starting at $10 for 20 inch prints!

If anyone is interested in how to make this yourself, you don't need a fancy program. This method is faster then OPs, because it can be faster than real time (but it uses disk space).

(This is the command line guide, so it may require advanced knowledge)

You just need to install ffmpeg, and imagemagick.

Edit: See barracuda415's improved version below!^[1]

My version:

1. First, get the average color out of each frame in a video and save each one as a .png file.

   ffmpeg -i <your movie file> -vf scale=1:1 -r 1 <output folder>/%06d.png
   

2. Using imagemagick, merge all the colors together

   convert +append <output folder>/* out.png
   

3. Scale the output to the desired height

   mogrify -scale x50\! out.png
   

Bingo!

My friend did this with 24 movies as a byproduct of comparing Hollywood vs. Bollywood use of colour in film. Here's the imgur album, and here is the analysis.

I did a similar thing by pulling every 3rd frame from a movie and blurred it, and then compressed into 3px wide slices. http://i.imgur.com/FmfKXH8.png

Every frame? Do you mean 1 frame from every second of the film? Otherwise these pictures are way too small.

Here's one of The Matrix: http://i.imgur.com/8AbArMz.jpg

Wait, the width of your PNGs is about 8K pixels. A movie should have more than 90K frames, how exactly do you sample? Is your original PNG 90K and the imgur files are down-sampled?

I love these, The Harry Potter Series is really good also. You can really see the series shift to a darker tone.

Are these really the true average? They seem representative of how we might perceive a frame, however to really be averages from a technical point of view, these feel like they are very saturated. Is this the average hue/similar at full saturation? That seems likely, and probably what you meant, rather than "the average of every pixel" as I was thinking at first.

Maybe just the top movies from /r/movies? I know I'd greatly appreciate it

This is one of my all-time favorite dataisbeautiful posts.

If each picture is 6255 pixels wide, and each column is a frame, then that would mean these pictures only represent about 3.5 minutes of actual content...?

In the Wall-E one you can see the transition between earth to space.

Hey OP is that your site http://thecolorsofmotion.com/films

or is you just a rotten hearted copy cat

Anyone known what the single bright yellow line is 3/4 through wall-e?

This is gonna get buried, but YOU HAVE TO DO PLEASANTVILLE. The transition from black and white to color would be really interesting.

How are you calculating the 'average color'? Average hex value of every pixel in the frame?

Mad Max Fury Road did a lot of its storytelling just by using color. I bet the compressed image for the movie would tell the story pretty well.

These all look like the crazy bookcase scene from Interstellar.

I want to see so many more now like The Matrix, Fight Club, Kill Bill (blood scenes!) and 300.

A professor at my university does a ton of these!

Here is his website

He also has videos of tons of frames playing at once, and does things like giving each frame a coordinate on a sphere based on it's coordinates or something crazy like that.

Also..there will be an android app (and eventually ios if i remember correctly) sometime next year where you are able to play games guessing various movies.

There's also a guide on how to create your own on his site!

MORE OF THESE. MORE.

Can you do Shaun of the Dead so I can print it out and hang it on my wall? And/or Office Space

I would also like a poster or a high res version

Source

Edit: I realize OP's are slightly different. This page has almost the same thing for hundreds of titles.

Oh look, MAD MAX! http://imgur.com/B5TcM9s

What Dreams May Come...I'd like to see that movie in this format.

How do you mean this as an average colour?

Now that's beautiful data

Oh look, it's any of the Nolan batman movies: |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

I hacked together something to do this in python in about 2 hours. It needs openCV and pillow, but it seems to work okay. For now, it does every frame as a pixel. I need to pick a number of pixels of width to do, and only do every couple of frames. (but I'm already up past my bedtime.)

github gist

example image from some boring video I had on my laptop

do the fugitive please /u/etherealpenguin. and stanley kubricks films.

You can see where they're on top of the world and where everything falls apart.

I love that I can pick out the "squishy" scene in Nemo from the Nemo pic.

Now do Citizen Kane!

What color space averaging are you using? I find YUV works out best for perceptual color averaging.

The Aladdin movie shows beauty just in its color, actually blows my mind. Thanks OP.

edit I would love to see Game of Thrones season by season like this.

Love the Wall-E one, really shows when he leaves and returns to the wastelands of earth

It's interesting to observe where they stuck to a similar pallet of colors like Aladin or Moonrise Kingdom and where they spread further out across colors that work well together (I had a few courses in color theory in college but it's been too long to tell you why these particular ones work together). It always amazes me how choosing the right color schemes and color relations can do to the look and feel of things. Even the oversaturated on white color scheme of Mirrors Edge has captured a generation of designers. There are some very beautiful websites, games, moves, etc. out there that capture color theory very well (amongst many other design elements).

As someone who does backend web development, I have try to learn about all this kind of stuff for when I do front end. My hat goes off to those who can do it very well because it makes a big difference.

Hi guys! I'm the creator of The Colors of Motion( http://thecolorsofmotion.com/ ), the project some people have been referencing here. I responded to some of the comments on this post: https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3rcz3y/the_colors_of_motion_oc/cwmww1b

OP please find out if its legal for you to make prints of these and sell them, I want to give you money for one

Do some classics! Like 12 Angry Men or Breakfast at Tiffany's

many of these can be found here - http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/

That would make a pretty colorway for yarn.

I'd love to see this with directors who make specific use of colors like Guillermo del Torro (Pan's Labyrinth)

Here's one of The Matrix: http://i.imgur.com/8AbArMz.jpg

I may get down voted, but... Time to sell the code/program to Netflix. They can crowd source processing and then sell prints. Money and chill.

I guess that a per-pixel average doesn't look all that interesting.

Ha, jokes on you op. I'm colorblind.

I'm not sure if you really means average (mean). I think median would be a better choice than mean.

Let me get this straight:

You take each frame of a movie, about 24 frames per second, and so for a 2 hour movie thats around ~173000 frames or so; it averages to a pretty high number.

Each frame has however many pixels. If we assume HD that is 1920x1280 is ~2,460,000 pixels in a single frame.

So, you take the value of each pixel, which is represented by 3 bytes, 1 byte per color (RGB = red, green, blue = 3 bytes) and adds those bytes with the bytes of every other pixel; around 2,416,000 additions for each and every single frame. Then, you divides that number by the # pixels to get the average color of that frame in a single 3 byte value.

You then repeats that process for every single frame, correct?

Cool. Does it take a long time to process all that or not? I feel like the number of instructions would be around the 10^9'th or 10^10th power range, and so a Ghz processor would have no problem dealing with this in a couple seconds or so.

Also, 173,000*3bytes=519kB. Not a lot of raw data to be honest!

Do Sin City now!

I'd love to see one done of Bladerunner, the use of colours/pathetic fallacy is used so well.

getting that on canvas would be killer

I expected more pink with gbh

I'm honestly surprised there isn't more blue in "finding Nemo".

To give a sense of scale, that bright green section 2/3 of the way through Finding Nemo is the scene where the fish in the dentist's office purposefully make their tank filthy. That scene lasts just under 1min30sec.

This is just awesome

Very cool. I can't see the titles though. Is that because I'm in mobile instead of pc? Weird.

when you look at every frame it's like you re-watch the movie in a second

They say if you average the horizontal lines of The Wall (compressing each frame into a single vertical line), and doing the same for Yellow Submarine, and then take those vertical lines and interlace them, you get a picture of dickbutt.

They make great wallpapers too

Have you considered doing "Hero"? I would think this movie would work exceptionally well given that the different colours represent who is telling the story, and whether or not their piece of the story is true. I can't think of a movie that would work better.

More posts like this in this sub, plz. So good.

I feel like Ive seen this before.

I want my room wallpapered with that!

I love seeing the relationships between color and story tone.

It seems like - brighter openings, then darkens around the initial crisis, evens out during the middle stretch, darkens/flattens approaching the final crisis, followed by a brighter denouement

The third one is a. Atman movie, right?

I hope Star Wars is top of the list to do next.

For Aladdin and the Wes Anderson movies, it really rang true. Very neat.

I'd be interested to see Avatar and Man of Steel, because I know for the latter they greyed/dulled the colors a bit

You should do this with a run-through of fallout 3. It would be solid green.

Do you think it would be possible to get these (or another movie) Fractured?

I wonder what it would look like if pixel for pixel you took the average. So I would expect each 1920x1080 pixels for example, to be slightly different. Might just look like colourful noise in the end

Somebody crop them together and make a wallpaper!

You can see the jellyfish scene in finding nemo where the bright pink bar is

I love the pic of Moonrise Kingdom. I just love the shooting choices Wes Anderson makes

I bet if you did Punch Drunk Love it would look identical to Aladdin.

Man, I would LOVE a site that sells these as art. I would totally own the Star Wars Trilogy in this format

Its amazing how well i remember what scene is happening in those colors. Especially the pixar movies.

I bet mad max would look really cool, it goes from orange to blue with the day and night transition

the green bar in finding nemo is the scene when the fish in the tank stop the tank cleaner and the tank gets dirty.

Can you please make one for the movie "The Artist" ? Would be awesome!

I'd love to see wizard of oz

That's great!

I would love to see Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy in such pictures

The red part near the start of Finding Nemo must be the sea anemone.

Could you make the code available to download, so we mortals can make our own?

This saves me a lot of time instead of watching the movies.

I don't understand these feels.

Any Michael Bay movie would just be a mixture of neon blue (for background lighting), a greasy, tan orange (everyone's skin color), fiery red (for all the explosions), and then camouflage (for the US Army).

I expected more saturated pinks from The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Can you put a fucking spoiler tag on this dude, jeez.

/s

Now let's see "Fifty Shades of Grey"

The Aladdin one looks like I'm defragging my hard drive.

This is really cool! They kinda remind me of military badges. Would be interesting to see how war movies look.

This is fucking awesome

I feel like when people ask, "What exactly is the kind of content that is appropriate for the /r/dataisbeautiful sub?" we should point to this series of pictures.

It's data. It's a very clear and simple presentation of it, and it is beautiful.

I thought this was posted quite awhile back I believe. And the top comment was something along the lines of someone liking the color orange in the Aladdin pic, and was going to try and mix it or something rather.

Would love to see one for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty! Its one of the most visually stunning movies IMO

Interstellar. Please. PLEASE.

There's an artist that did that for titanic it looked pretty awesome. http://salavon.com/work/TopGrossingFilmAllTime/

Star Wars please!

Wouldn't it just be always near grey? These averages seem really dominant in single colors

I'd rather watch any of these movies than look at this shit again.

Is there an Interstellar one?

I found some software online ages ago and made the finding nemo movie barcode and printed it out at work. Looks great hanging in my home theatre. http://i.imgur.com/d2g7WCp.jpg

Aladdan is beautiful.

What's really cool here is that you can see that the second half of Act II in all of these films is generally darker as things start going wrong for the protagonist.

The pink strip in Finding Nemo is the scene with the Jellyfish. Just thought that was cool.

Can anyone explain what the title means? Is every super thin vertical line a frame?

This is cool, though I've seen a few sites that have done this already.

If anyone's looking for specific movies, both http://thecolorsofmotion.com/films and http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ have a bunch. I even think there was a way to purchase a lot of them, but I can't remember how, or if that was another different site altogether.

What About Bob?

Moonrise Kingdom is an excellent film.

I wonder what Star Wars Episode II would look like. Every frame is so dense

There should be a subreddit for this kind of thing

How do you do this?!

Um, I admit that I've never heard of Moonrise Kingdom or Grand Budapest Hotel. Am I doing myself a disservice by not knowing of them?

One of my friends is currently working on a senior design (cs major) to make an automatic process of creating these and remaking a website to display them neatly

So is the original un-compressed picture 135000 pixels wide for a 90 minute movie? You'd need over 70 full hd screens side by side to view it without compression .

Could someone do White Heat for me?

I kind of wanted to see Drive on this list

This is fantastic. I'm curious about "average color." What does that mean and how is it determined.

I was just wondering what The Grand Budapest Hotel would look like when I saw the first one and low and behold there it is. Absolutely gorgeous colors in that film.

There's something interestingly beautiful with this.

You need to add Star Wars, LotR and The Hobbit asap imo. BTW, is it possible that using movies to create this might be copyrighted somehow?

Color is extremely important in movies. Different colors influence the way we feel, this is why horror movies for example tend to use lots of red, white and black.

I would be very curious in the legitimacy of such a task.

I see a pattern. Light dark light dark. interesting.

Big Trouble in Little China please. As Ol' Jack Burton would say. "The check is in the mail."

I've seen a lot of these before, they're awesome.

This would look cool for Sin City.

All I see is the tesseract scene from Interstellar.

Wow! Looking at this high makes me think I'm watching a movie

I kinda want that for every film I'd want to see. So I know what it's gonna look like before seeing it. Certain colors when overwhelmingly present turn a possibly good film into a boring pile of poop to me.

How long does it take for you to make these, because I have a ton of requests. Also, would tv shows or full concert videos be possible?

Can you do a Tim Burton movie? The likes of Edward scissorhands would look great

I'm wondering whether there is a science behind it

So very interesting.

The Hunt for Red October please!!!

Can someone here do some fancy color code math to find the "average color" of each film?

Is The Color Purple really purple?

I still love the one of all the Harry potter movies. Just the steady darkening was powerful.

So simple yet so cool.

Aladdin is my favorite film. This is sweet.

It sounds silly but I feel I can get the mood of each movie by looking at each of the slides! I dunno if that's professionally intended or some form of my own mental bias!

Hey /u/etherealpenguin,

This is now the top post on reddit. It will be recorded at /r/topofreddit with all the other top posts.

Wonder if this has any bearing whatsoever on the popularity of a movie.

Tron legacy :

http://www.redbubble.com/people/moviebarcode/works/7613362-moviebarcode-tron-legacy-2010-simplified-colors

Thanks for the new wallpaper!

Why do I like this?

Huh. WALL-E you can actually follow the plot. Sepia, then darkness, so in the open on Earth then going in his caravan/shack, then a longer period of sepia so he's back outside, then BAM BLUE LIGHT MOTHA FUCKER. Things get darker then, as most of the EVA scenes are at night, then whoosh sepia fading... fading... fading...

Blue. Welcome to the Axiom. Then the darker segments are from when in the captain's chamber. There's one point that's particularly bright, which I suspect is the robot-surgery room because of the white hologram shields.

People might enjoy this about colour in film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXgFcNUWqX0

Star Wars - Old trilogy vs. new trilogy

Star Trek - 1st Movie vs. latest movie

This makes me have a weird thought.

I feel that this is something my subconscious picks up on when watching a whole movie, yet it does not "save" in the normal ways as a memory, if that makes any sense. Which makes me imagine when we are able to enhance our minds and be able to perceive our subconscious mind.. And then.. I'll stop there.. :D

Show me that sweet Blair Witch Project print.

These are awesome!

It would also be cool if you could do designs that compiled every frame and averaged the colour in each pixel for the movie as a whole instead of over a timeline frame-by-frame

Can I pick a movie? How bout fifth element

Op I've wanted this forever! You just delivered big time

Pooh do clockwork orange!!!

Woah it's cool that they make me think that they're moving.

I wonder if they used this technique on Interstellar, to define the colour and design of the tesseract, actually using Interstellar as the source of the colours too. Might make a weird kind of sense.

Please do the matrix

Truly a beautiful "data is beautiful"

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou please :)

What is the range of the picture? fail

This is what one's life would look like.

What is seen as the 'average color'?

Anyone else spot the scene where they go through the jellyfish in finding nemo? This is beyond awesome

I wonder if movies like The Decent, Saw or Battle Royale would come out mostly just red?

Im going to be critical and say you picked the wrong films to demonstrate it on; None of those films use colour to highlight story. Something like Pleasantville or Hero do.

Tarkovsky's Stalker would be lovely. Would definitely buy it when available :)

I once saw a spectrum of the whole Harry Potter series here on Reddit, you could see how it just went darker and darker...

Yeah that's awesome but.. who comes up with ideas like that?

I'm really curious what one of these made with porn would look like... Probably just a lot of tan and pink everywhere. Someone do it please

Now I want every frame of every movie compressed into a single picture.

Wow :D

Hmmm, what would frozen look like?

I had the idea a while back to use this + tolerance to fingerprint movies, and build a service that could automatically detect which movie/tv-show was in a file, and provide metadata for that as a result.

Similar services already exist for music, but I wanted to build one for movies.

Never thought that the resulting images would look so nice

How is this OC? I've seen this posted no less than 3 times before.

In the Wall-E one you can see the transition between earth to space.

Well that made for a great game on the company chat!

http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com has been doing this for a while. No idea if they do prints though. Great idea!

This is not oc....http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3514313860/the-matrix-1999-prints