Week 11 Studio: Movie Cloud
For this studio, you should write a program that creates a Movie Cloud. A movie cloud is a word cloud, but about a movie. Your program should ask the user for the name of a movie. Then it should search that movie in The Movie Database, and get the list of actors in the movie. Using turtle, it should draw the the name of the movie in big letters, and then the list of the top actors in the movie.
That’s it. Get a movie name, query TMDB, draw a word cloud of actors . Have fun with it. Be creative.
What follows is just advice for doing it. You don’t have to follow my advice. Do whatever you want. This is just my experience in doing this, and you might want to do it differently.
Advice
Reuse Code
Last week in Studio 10 you wrote code to create a word cloud from a file. This studio is similar. Try to see if you can reuse any of the code you wrote last week to help with this week’s studio. Last’s weeks instructions also include examples of word clouds to help you with inspiration.
Finish the Lab
If you didn’t finish this week’s lab, you should make sure that at least one of you finished through Exercise 8 – getting TMDB API access working. If not, go back and do Exercise 8, and possibly all of the exercises. Specifically, you should make sure that you can retrieve and print out movie information from TMDB first, before you try to display it using turtle.
How much data do you need?
Think about how much data do you need to draw your word cloud? Only getting 1 actor probably isn’t enough to be meaningful. Getting 1000 actors seems like a lot. How much data do you want to use? You might want to limit the size of your cloud.
Visual Size
You can do things to make your visualization more interesting. For example, TMDB has a “popularity” score for each actor that indicates how popular she/he is. You could sort the list by popularity, and/or draw more popular actors in a larger font.
Expand to Actor Cloud
Rather than just displaying a word cloud for a movie, can you make a version that takes an actor’s name, and displays his/her movies? Each movie has a popularity score also that you could sort by or use to control the font size. Movies also have budget information, so you could make movies with bigger budgets have a larger font? Be creative.
Improve the wordcloud and the layout
You made word clouds last week also. You can and should definitely re-use that code for this week’s studio. But think about how you can make it better. Can you make the layout of the words on the screen better?
You’ve got a movie that you are representing visually. Another way of thinking of the “movie cloud” is as a text-based movie poster. Have your program draw a poster-like representation of the movie on the screen with turtle. Does that shift in mindset give you ideas for how it might look?
Challenge: User Input
Once you get a movie cloud drawn, try to accept user input. Allow the user to type in the name of a movie. Get the list of actors for that movie, and draw them on the screen in a movie cloud. Try it out; can you make it work for multiple different movies?