Graphic designer and creative coder Frederic Brodbeck has analyzed movies to create a visual “fingerprint” for them, analyzing information such as editing structure, color, speech or motion and transforming them into graphic representations that can be compared side by side.

The project, called Cinemetrics, was for Brodbeck’s thesis in generative design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Brodbeck recognized that there were already lots of infographics using metadata related to movies, such as budget, box office data and awards. However, he was keen to use the movie itself as a source of data and create visualizations that captured the movies in their entirety.

Brodbeck disassembled video files into their components — video, audio, subtitles — and then processed them frame by frame, detecting when a shot ended, how much movement there is in the scene, and the colors used within the scene. These were fed into visualizations that are much more interactive and detailed than the likes of the Moviebarcode project, which Wired.co.uk reported on a few months ago.

The resulting “fingerprints” look a little like pie charts. The size of the pie corresponds to the length of the film. The segments of the fingerprint correspond to the length of the shots within the film. You can view the overall colors used in the entire movie, and broken down by each chapter. The amount that the segments move reflects the amount of movement in that scene. You can even click on the chart to see the particular frames that have been analyzed.

The visualizations allow you to compare in a glance the difference between an original and a remake, movies from the same genre or movies by one director.

Brodbeck explained on his website: “Not only cinema enthusiasts and people doing film studies might benefit, but also for regular people an alternative way of looking at movies could provide an interesting new way of choosing movies based on formal criteria. For instance: ‘I don’t want to see the dark one with lots of motion, that colorful one with the great amount of spoken words looks much more interesting to me.’”

Check out the video showcasing what Cinemetrics can do above.