The DataHero Blog

San Francisco’s scenery is some of the most instantly recognizable in the United States, from the Painted Ladies in Alamo Square, to the Golden Gate Bridge, these icons have made up the backdrops for some of our favorite movies for decades. As DataHero’s roots are in the Bay Area, we took a shot at sifting through some of this movie data.

Below is a graph of movies set in San Francisco from 1915-2012, with a fairly steady increase all the way until 2007 where you’ll see a sharp drop, then the movies pick up again a bit in 2010 but not to the pre-2007 levels.

 

 

To delve into this information a little deeper, I’d like to analyze the movies that featured the most San Francisco scenes from 2000-2012. The movie Milk ranks top for number of scenes feature a San Francisco backdrop during this time period, which isn’t surprising as the culture and of San Francisco at the time was a major component of the movie.

 

 

It’s also interesting to analyze this data by neighborhood, as there are few cities that have as so many neighborhoods with such distinct personalities. You can see from this cumulative graph that North Beach (which in this case includes Telegraph Hill) is the most popular neighborhood.

Then we could break it down by neighborhood, to see what specific attractions or locations are featured in each neighborhood that garnered so much attention. For example, these are the locations that were featured in movies in the Mission. Dolores Park and the War Memorial Building feature prominently, while some of the other locations are houses or storefronts.

 

To play around with the dataset yourself, check it out here. Stay tuned for more data exploration into San Francisco, as well! To start getting insights into your own data, give DataHero a try.

 

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