Writing

In A World…Without Don LaFontaine

Don LaFontaine, voice artist for some 5,000 movies and 350,000 advertisements passed away Monday. He’s the man who came up with the “In A World…” that begins most film trailers, as well as the baritone voice style that goes with it. The Washington Post has an obituary.

In the early 1960s, he landed a job in New York with National Recording Studios, where he worked alongside radio producer Floyd L. Peterson, who was perfecting radio spots for movies. Until then, movie studios primarily relied on print advertising or studio-made theatrical trailers. The two men became business partners and, together, perfected the familiar format.

Mr. LaFontaine, who was editing, writing and producing in the early days of the partnership, became a voice himself by accident. In 1964, when an announcer failed to show up for a job, he recorded himself reading copy and sent it to the studio with a message: “This is what it’ll sound like when we get a ‘real’ announcer.”

Trailer for The Elephant Man, proclaimed to be his favorite:

And a short interview/documentary:

Don’s impact is unmistakable, and it’s striking to think of how his approach changed movie advertising. May he rest in peace.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008 | movies  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.