The Data For This Dashboard
This dashboard week, the focus was on Pixar movies. This meant the data was on details about the movies, the actors, and the people working on the movies. Since this was our last day, the data didn’t need to be cleaned and came straight as excel files ready to go. The data was very easy to use, as well, since all the tables connected in a very simplistic way.
Introducing My Topic
The topic I chose to look into for this dashboard week was something I was genuinely interested in: Whether Pixar’s recent movies are objectively worse than their earlier movies. To put in plainly, Is Pixar on a downward trend, or has a few bad movies made everyone think Pixar is going downhill. I haven’t watched most of Pixar’s recent movies so I didn’t have my own thoughts going into this, but I was curious where the data would take me.
The Dashboard Overview
I first start my dashboard with some key stats and an overview. These stats also update as the dashboard is filtered, providing interactivity to the dashboard. I then jump into the first major stat I will be comparing: Movie ratings. Three scoring types were given in the data, Metacritic, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes. Looking at each of these types provides an average displaying the first half of the movies as higher rated than there later counterparts, suggesting worse quality movies as time progresses.
The next metric I focus on is the budget of the movies, to see if the cost of the movie has gone up, resulting in what I would suspect is a better movie. The data seems to suggest on average that Pixar is spending a lot more on their recent movies compared to their earlier movies. Despite this, the average rating is still much lower on their movies.
I’m quite happy with how this dashboard turned out visually and as a whole. I like to think the colours work very well together, and I like the idea that the dashboard has some level of interaction rather than just spoon feeding the conclusions to the user.
Data Analysis
Analyzing the data was quite easy, since I used very intuitive and easy to understand metrics such as budget and review score. In the future, it would have made a lot more sense to look at profit as the metric instead of budget.
Insights
Much to my surprise – considering most of my other dashboard week projects have proved inconclusive – the data showed a fairly obvious decline throughout the latest 14 movies compared to the earlier 14 movies from Pixar. I was already expecting this result, having based my dashboard on proving this fact. Some part of me, however, was hoping it wasn’t the case, having grown up on Pixar movies through most of my childhood. Nonetheless, that just means there is room to grow for the company and past history proves they are able to achieve greatness again.
Conclusion
With dashboard week now over, I am quite happy with the work I was able to produce during the 5 days, and I hope my blogs were able to present this well. The time was challenging, that’s for sure, having a lot of late nights to finish off the dashboards, but I don’t regret doing that at all. Having these 5 dashboards up on my profile makes me proud to have done the work, and I would do it again if I could (just not any time soon).
Thanks for reading, if you would like to check out my dashboard feel free to check it out here.