Ambrosia, (named after the food or drink of the Greek gods where if consumed allows for longevity and immortality), is a collection of posters that look into the film trope of 'Dawson's Casting'. The trope is used to describe when actors portray characters much younger than themselves. The trope, named after the tv show 'Dawson's Creek', is most often found within teen tv shows. For as long as I have been a watcher of teen tv shows, the ages of the actors behind the scenes has intrigued me. Through the creation of the posters, I have looked at the variation of age between actors and their characters, directing my attention towards the most popular tv teen shows, to see if they have used this trope in their productions.
Ambrosia visualises data through a line connecting the ages of the actors and the character they portray. It is shown this way so that the two ages can be compared and the difference in age can be seen clearly. Additionally, within these posters, the lines are colour coded - with the information in the key - as I have given the characters a role based on how they act within their respective shows. These roles are an interesting way to compare the ages as they can seemingly show a pattern for example in multiple shows the ‘love interests’ are some of the oldest actors involved. These posters explore 'Dawson’s Casting' and compare data surrounding age. The comparison is shown between multiple teen tv shows, their genres and the characters' roles.
In visualising the data I have been inspired by 'Timelines: time travel in popular film and tv' designed by David McCandless, Alice Cho, Dominic Busby, where they have designed a graphic that shows a timeline of where time travel appears within film & tv and how they have interconnected. I chose this data visualisation as inspiration because of its clear and simple way to read the data. But I was particularly intrigued by their use of lines and I wanted to emulate such an output in my work. This collection takes 10 teen tv shows, separates them into five genres, and aims to look at correlations of age between the actors and characters. This output has allowed multiple shows to be incorporated into the same image, to spread out the data and make a comparison.
Ambrosia was created using data that was gathered from the internet and was designed within Adobe Illustrator.