Uploaded March 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Glad to have this personal project finally done and out the gate! Easily my biggest editing job yet.
This was an idea I had in October 2021 - how cool would it be to tell a year of my film watching history through analytics?? And so I started drafting categories and ideas for the video through 2022, when I could actually start making the video. Here we are now - 3 months later, after grabbing all the relevant data, running the analytics, graphing them, and constantly adding new categories and edits to various parts of the analytics and the video - video complete! It was a shame I had to throw away different ideas through the process or couldn't make certain parts of the video prettier since I am by no means an editor nor have the editing software to do so, but I am still really happy with the end result. One of the big things was the actual analytics graphs, because having excel graphs in a video is basically a cinema sin. But there wasn't a better way to display it without getting an actual editor to work some magic for me, either by making some graphic without the ugly white background, or by animating the analytics. I did edit one graph to have a transparent background, but it was hard to crop cleanly, extremely time consuming, and it was just harder to see the info. Regardless, I already know that I pushed the boundaries of my cheap software since it was slowing down to a snail's pace towards the end.
The biggest decision was whether or not to add the full listing (population) at the end of the video. I was trying to make this a short video (3 min MAX) and typically for analytics you're not concerned with the population, but since this video also acts more like a personal lookback into my viewing history, it only made sense to include it. Especially as the years go by; no one wants to go digging through my letterboxd to find out what the actual films that I watched were in 2021.
I'm not sure if I'd want to do this again for future years given how long this one took me. Maybe if I have another prolific watching year and the time!
Songs used:
1) Daniel Hart - O Nyghtegale (From "The Green Knight")
2) Alexandre Desplat - Animated Car Chase (From "The French Dispatch")
3) Alain Goraguer - Ten Et Tiwa ("From Fantastic Planet")
Glad to have this personal project finally done and out the gate! Easily my biggest editing job yet.
This was an idea I had in October 2021 - how cool would it be to tell a year of my film watching history through analytics?? And so I started drafting categories and ideas for the video through 2022, when I could actually start making the video. Here we are now - 3 months later, after grabbing all the relevant data, running the analytics, graphing them, and constantly adding new categories and edits to various parts of the analytics and the video - video complete! It was a shame I had to throw away different ideas through the process or couldn't make certain parts of the video prettier since I am by no means an editor nor have the editing software to do so, but I am still really happy with the end result. One of the big things was the actual analytics graphs, because having excel graphs in a video is basically a cinema sin. But there wasn't a better way to display it without getting an actual editor to work some magic for me, either by making some graphic without the ugly white background, or by animating the analytics. I did edit one graph to have a transparent background, but it was hard to crop cleanly, extremely time consuming, and it was just harder to see the info. Regardless, I already know that I pushed the boundaries of my cheap software since it was slowing down to a snail's pace towards the end.
The biggest decision was whether or not to add the full listing (population) at the end of the video. I was trying to make this a short video (3 min MAX) and typically for analytics you're not concerned with the population, but since this video also acts more like a personal lookback into my viewing history, it only made sense to include it. Especially as the years go by; no one wants to go digging through my letterboxd to find out what the actual films that I watched were in 2021.
I'm not sure if I'd want to do this again for future years given how long this one took me. Maybe if I have another prolific watching year and the time!
Songs used:
1) Daniel Hart - O Nyghtegale (From "The Green Knight")
2) Alexandre Desplat - Animated Car Chase (From "The French Dispatch")
3) Alain Goraguer - Ten Et Tiwa ("From Fantastic Planet")
