The Cinemas of the City of Melbourne

By Matt Blanc, RMIT University

Who doesn’t love a night out to the movies? The Cinemas of the City of Melbourne is an interactive map designed to encourage people in Melbourne to try out different cinemas and get to know their city a little better. All 7 cinemas in the City of Melbourne are displayed on the map, with a custom icon delineating independent and chain cinemas. Clicking on a cinema will bring up more information about it, including the number of screens, phone number, and website, as well as a button to go to the cinema’s movie times. Below that, map users can see walking directions from the cinema to the nearest train station, tram stop, or car park, and get directions to the cinema using their preferred method of transport. To add a bit of fun, there’s also a “choose a random cinema” button (if they need help deciding) and a menu to filter the cinemas by the day of the week they offer discounted tickets.

The colours, typefaces, and styling of the map were designed to evoke the feeling of a night out at the movies, while remaining CVD accessible. The colours used for the walking directions match those used by the major public transport companies in Melbourne, so that they would feel familiar to locals. The map was built using Mapbox GL JS, data for the cinema locations was collected manually using Google Maps, transit locations data came from Data Vic and the City of Melbourne, routing analysis was done using ArcGIS Pro using a network dataset created from data from the City of Melbourne. The basemap was created in Mapbox Studio. UI elements were designed in Figma and implemented in HTML/CSS and Javascript.

If you’re not in Melbourne, I at least hope this map inspires you to try out a new cinema in your home town!