In 2015, we extented the research of CCTV Chinese New Year Gala from CCTV Gala Opening Three-Minute Redux to a full scale version. We smashed videos from the Gala over the last 33 years from 1983 through 2015 and refactored frames into various timelines, thus revealing how red-dominated the Chinese mass media really is. Or is the Chinese mass media not as red-dominated as we assumed?

The figure above shows the matrix of 33 years of GALAs. Each frame is one second of the shows, each row has 20 frames so that is 20 seconds. The original resolution was 21,120x15,300, and was reduced to 960x695 for better online experience.

In the early years, like 1983/1984, the majority of the colors are grayish, and it is getting more and more colorful due to technology and ideology, users can check out the trend by themselves.

We published a paper on this topic in Chinese Watching Chinese New Year Gala from Neptune through WeChat mobile platform on February 22 2015. An English paper is in plan.

The following slide shows the reframed timeline of each year's Gala, each pie represents one year's show from 1983 to 2015, so one can view one year's Gala in one look.

Some notes:

1. Data was collected from officially published DVDs.

2. We sampled one frame for one second of the real TV program, the outter side of the pie is the earlier time of the show, so the end of the show is in the center.

3. The length of each year's Gala varies from four hours to five and half hours, so that is about 14,400 to close to 20,000 frames per picture.

4. The original resolution of the pictures was 16,000x16,000, we reduced it to 690x690 for easy views online.

The next slide shows relationship between redness and saturation. Again, each picture shows the frames, one for each second, of one year's GALA. To position a frame, x coordination is decided by redness median of all pixels in that frame (0-255) and y coordination is decided by saturation median of all pixels in that frame (0-255).

Our next slide shows the values of hue over time line. Again, each picture represents the data of a year. The value of x axis is the time line in minute, and the value of axis is the hue median (0-255). So, the first column will show frames of the first minute of each GALA, each frame, which means one second of the show, is located according to hue median of all pixels in that frame. The length of x axis is the length of a GALA in minutes. The bottom part of one picture is data for an individual year, and the top part is data accumulated from 1983 till that year, for example, if the bottom shows 1999, then the top shows all data from 1983 through 1999.

We implemented several applications showing the GALA in diffirent ways with sound, and we are planning to put them online in the future. We are also planning to build some interactive applicatons and put them online so users can play around. Stay tune.