I watched the first episode of Dark last summer, but after being utterly terrified for an hour I decided this is not for the faint-hearted like me. How wrong I was. For those who are afraid of jumpscares, there’s nothing like that in any of the episodes, just pure old tension and mystery. This series is put together like somethings that only Germans can do. Everything fits its place perfectly, with no holes in the story and almost impossible to find out the twists. Click here to see the interactive version on my Tableau Public profile.
Some weeks ago I gave it another try, instantly I got hooked on binge-watching and started sketching the network on paper. One of my friends told me that I should at least double the size of the canvas and hope I have a big rubber at hand. He was right indeed, but even if it looked like a mess at the end, I managed to fit it to the A4 format.
From very early on, I knew that I wanted it to look like the God particle wrapped inside the inextricable connection of people. But I just didn’t know how to make a chord chart. I reached out to several people (Toan Hoang and Luke Stanke among many) because I didn’t even know how my data should look like. As a data prep noob, I couldn’t have done this without the help of István Korompai who is the data mastermind behind this visualization. He’s the type of guy who’s always willing to help and comes up with the craziest solutions!
To have the desired effect I had to make a 3D sphere in photoshop to make this blob a living thing. I had two takes, the first was playing with shadows and highlights, the second is creating a glass-like effect. I tried out both but stuck with the first version for the final design.
Having a look now, I might have missed the colors, but I just like how it turned out at the end. The only thing left after following the instructions of Pisti was to load my prepared data into the .twbx file and fix my tooltips. The 3rd and final cycle starts on 27th June on Netflix, so this might refresh memories, but there’s a big spoiler alert here! I loved making this viz and it’s probably my biggest favorite right now.
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