Brendan Dawes, an insanely brilliant programmer, has created Cinema Redux — an application that produces a massive poster composed of tiny snapshots of each scene in a film. In essence, he produces a huge image that lets you “see” the entire film in one eyeful. He wrote a really nice description of the aesthetic purpose of his project, so here it is in his own words:

The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process. Compare Serpico to The Conversation. You can see there’s far more edits in Lumet’s classic compared to the more gentle slower pace of Coppola’s Conversation. This is also down to the editing style of Walter Murch who prefers to only make cuts when absolutely necessary.

That picture above is a small chunk of the poster of Alfred Hithcock’s Vertigo. You can see more examples of the images here, and even buy a poster of one of them.

(Thanks to the J-Walk blog for finding this one!)