Movie Barcode

Movie Barcode is a fascinating look at movies. Basically each frame of the movie is shrunk down to a line, such that eventually the entire movie begins to look like a bar-code. What is fascinating is how some of the more visual movies still manage to retain and display their style.

Blade Runner, one of the more visually specific movies, is up first. The movie is about a dystopian future, and is shot under artificial lights, with a heavy blue-green cast. The dingy, cold, steel-like visual style comes right through in its bar-code.

Jaws is all about the terror under blue skies. Look at the alternating bands of the black of fear and the baby blue of a clear summer day. Notice also the scene at night towards the end of the movie.

Green and black - if ever there was a movie that epitomizes that palette, it is The Matrix. That white band a quarter of the way in is Neo's training.

Pan's Labrynth is a fantastic movie, symbolized by a deep rich color palette. Alternating between a blue reality of war and a golden-brown fantasy, the two colors represent different aspects of Ofelia's world. Captured beautifully in it's bar-code.

Dusty, dirty and hazy, Apocalypse Now, the quintessential war movie and cliche-dialog fest, is dominated by browns. This was surprising for me as I was expecting a bit more green. But going back to the trailers proved me wrong, there was always the promise of green beyond the frame, but never any in it. The blue band in the middle seems to be the night journey up the Nung river.

The trippiest for the end. 2001: A Space Odyssey. True to its nature, there is no limiting the palette of the movie, it wildly swings from one end of the spectrum to the other. Notice the black band at the end. If you have seen the movie, you know exactly what that represents.