My initiation into Joni Mitchell’s music was through Parenthood when Lauren Graham and Mae Whitman sing "The Circle Game", as their characters contemplate motherhood, growing up, and change. Ever since, I started noticing how more and more music directors started referring to Joni to accompany their characters in pivotal moments of heartbreak, reflection, love, and longing. In this project, I look at how Joni Mitchell’s music has been used over time in visual media to confirm my observation that there is a rise in Joni Mitchell’s popularity in pop culture.
To do this analysis, I scraped IMDB using Beautiful Soup and manually pulled from several other web sources to consolidate a list of soundtrack credits, categorizing them into three broad categories (TV Series, Movies, TV Performances), and eight subcategories (Long-Form TV series, Mini-Series, Movies (Fiction), Documentaries, TV Movie, Shorts, Talk Show, TV Special). Using Python, I calculated the moving average of the number of appearances across time to create a trend line. The graph was created on RawGraphs, exported as a SVG into Adobe Illustrator and edited there. The last graph was created on Tableau. I drew the header image on Adobe Photoshop with my Wacom Tablet