Maps of the movies "Avatar" (left) and "The Avengers" (right) (Image source: Playback / Spotmaps)

The images above look strange, but they become much more meaningful if you think about how they were created. These queued squares are, in fact, a kind of color map used in film hits.

To generate such a map, Spotmaps author Andy Willis processes movies with the help of a script created using the Python programming language and the visual computing library known as OpenCV. Thus, a sample of the colors of each frame is taken and then a calculation is applied every 1 second of film to define the predominant color in the frames of that time interval.

Each line of a map is equivalent to 1 minute of film, so the length of the image also represents the length of the movies in minutes. In the image that opens this text we can check, side by side, the colored "fingerprints" of the films "Avatar" (left) and "The Avengers" (right).