Movies and magnets allows you to use virtual ‘magnets’ to attract films of your choosing. It allows you to specifiy magnets that represent certain characteristics (such as audience rating larger than 90). These magnets attract movies that comply with the characteristics, and repulse those that do not. You can combine multiple magnets and magnets can be added, changed and removed. Try it yourself at erikboertjes.com/moviesandmagnets.

Movies & magnets won a second prize in the third Information is Beautiful Awards visualization competition.

The tool is written in Processing. The metadata was provided by Information is Beautiful Awards. They did not provide the movie-poster thumbnails however. I wrote a small java program that downloads each movie-poster from the url provided by querying the IMDB API for each movie title (and year). The program then downscales each image to 32×47 pixel thumbnail. I used the toxiclibs library for calculating the position of the movie-thumbnails.