NYC film permits | An exploratory data analysis

Table of contents (TOC)

1 Introduction

Numerous motion picture, music, television and streaming production activities take place in New York City every year.

Permits are generally required for exclusive use of city properties, e.g. sidewalks, streets or parks. The Film Office, a division of the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME), issues permits for production activities in the NYC boroughs.

This exploratory data analysis (EDA) focuses on filming activities and aims at answering the following questions for the 2012-2021 period:

Data on film permits is provided by MOME via NYC Open Data.

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2 Data overview

A copy of the dataset was downloaded from the NYC Open Data website as a csv file on 22 May 2022. The file contains the following columns:

According to the Data Dictionary, the data provided by MOME refers to approved permits.

The dictionary also presents information on the event type the permit refers to:

The EDA is based on permits for filming activities (Shooting) only.

There are no duplicated film permits in the DataFrame, i.e. the dataset contains information on 74,938 permits.

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3 Data wrangling

65,194 permits for filming activities were issued between 2012 and 2021.

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4 Exploratory data analysis

4.1 Preferred boroughs for filming activities

While the Borough column refers to the first borough of activity for the day only, its values can still shed some light on the preferred boroughs for filming activities in NYC.

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4.2 Most common production categories

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4.3 Filming activities by production categories and boroughs

Filming activities related to film productions were the second most common in NYC boroughs.

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4.4 Productions by country of origin

The vast majority of productions were domestic.

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4.5 Filming activities scheduled by year

Only 2,304 filming activities were scheduled in 2020 as productions were heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

An activities-by-day bar chart may help understand how the pandemic affected productions in 2020.

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4.6 Filming activities scheduled by month

Was October the preferred month for filming activities in every year of the 2012-2021 period? Small multiples, a series of similar charts using the same scale and axes, can help answer the question.

October was the preferred month for filming activities in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. August was the favourite one in 2017 and 2021.

January had the lowest amount of filming activities in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2021 and the highest amount of said activities in 2020.

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4.7 Filming activities scheduled by day of the week

Was Sunday the least favourite day for filming activities in every year of the 2012-2021 period?

Thursday was the preferred day for filming activities in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018. Wednesday had the highest amount of filming activities in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

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4.8 Filming activities by borough and year

Brooklyn's participation in filming activities increased by 6 percent points between 2012 and 2021.

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4.9 Filming activities by category and year

Filming activities related to film productions decreased by 11 p.p. between 2012 and 2021.

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5 Conclusions

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