THE MAKING OF GLEE

In this post I am talking about one of my favorite vizes and recent VOTD, Glee. We all have a different creative process and for me the process can vary depending on the project. I can be inspired by the data or an image or something I see in the community.

For Glee, I knew I wanted to create something to showcase the characters and music of the show. I knew I would use IMDB data but outside of that, initially, I felt stuck.

Then I saw this icon...

The colors wowed me and I could see the seasons displayed in a rainbow similar to the icon. The next thing I found, inspiration for the character images.

After some searching I found the amazing and colorful headshots I used in the end but this was a enough to help me know my style and direction for the viz.

If I said this was an easy viz to create start to finish, I would be lying. In fact of the various projects I was considering for Tableau Public, this one almost did not make the cut. I abandoned my idea at least 3 times after getting stuck in various places of the creation. I say this because, what we all create and see on Tableau Public is not out of the box creation and sometimes things just don't turn out the way we plan but that shouldn't stop anyone. Keep pushing and keep trying.

Now, let's talk how did it all come together. We all learn in different ways so as a reminder, you

can download the Glee viz and dissect it yourself (it's a great way to learn) and you can follow along this post as I do my best to talk through my process.

Before jumping into Tableau, let's talk data. One of the most painful lessons I have learned in my experience with Tableau, one data source is THE BEST scenario for almost every interaction across the Viz. I say this is a painful lesson because there is nothing worse than having your viz 90% built and then going back to the data set to recreate your data to fit what you are looking to do. For Glee and many of the other IMDB vizes I've created I created a data structure similar to below. Is it the best way to go about it? Maybe not but there is a method to my madness.

There is much repetitive data in the set above mostly to be sure each episode and character has a line and then additionally each song. For example in episode 1.01 "Pilot" the character Finn Hudson appears several times giving a separate line for each song he sings.

Time to jump into Tableau!

For the Rating/Views charts, I used a dual axis with the episode rating and US Views. The magic I think comes in with the calculation used to highlight the bars and dots depending on which character is selected. For this, I created a parameter with the characters.

The calculation on color;

IF [Character Parameter] = 'All' THEN [Season] 

ELSEIF [Character] <> [Character Parameter] THEN [Season]

ELSE [Season] 

END

I repeated the same calculation for the song dots that fall below the bar charts.

One of my favorite designs elements in the Glee viz, the character shape changes when the character is selected. It turned out as a cool effect and wasn't too difficult to achieve.

I felt it was hard to visually know which character was selected and the shape swamp was a great detail to help aid this transition. So, how did I do this?

It's quite simple. The characters are on a dual axis. The original image is a square and then I used a transparent shape to help create the circle.

Set actions are used to create the action. The characters are part of a set and then the calculation

is put on shape.

IF [Character Set] THEN 'DARK SQUARE'

ELSE 'TRANSPARENT SQUARE'

END

Finally, on the dashboard, a set action is created. In a recent Tableau 2020.3, there was an update to include, the 'Clearing the selection will:' option. For Glee, I selected 'Remove all values from set'. This enables an easy transition from one character to another without the need to manually clear the selection.

**Big thank you to Kevin Flerlage and his help. He wrote a fantastic blog post on using transparent shapes, 14 Use Cases for Transparent Shapes & Images.

In the end, Glee was one of my favorite projects. The show was amazing, I LOVE musicals! Above all, I learned a tremendous amount. My first instinct was to abandon this project and move on, I was able to overcome this and finish a project I truly enjoyed.