The Warriors movie tribute

The Warriors movie is one of my favorites and after seeing it for the millionth time I wanted to visualize the path the gang took on a map. The story is set in a fictional future in New York city so naturally, I could not count on that the train network is the same as in modern New York. The goal is to project the path on the modern New York network as accurately as possible. The task proved to be much easier than I thought. The whole story is based on the gang moving through the city via the ‘optimal’ path (where optimal here means not getting killed) so evidence of their whereabouts is presented everywhere - the dialog, shooting locations, landmarks, etc. I just needed to collect them all. Since I wanted to present the path the story describes and not the map of the shooting locations the primary source of truth was the dialog because shooting locations and the story locations often don’t match. It is because of this that for some parts I had to use my free interpretation.

See the site here.

The application is written in ClojureScript and uses OpenLayers to display the map and the path. The data is stored in the edn file which is organized by movie segments (from Van Cortland to Tremont, train station - Baseball Furies, etc). Each movie segment is displayed as a separate path on the map using a different color. The code follows the vector of geographical points and draws them on the map alongside drawing the path line between them. Special points in the file marked with :story type have story text attached to them which can be viewed in the popup window when clicked on them.

I think it does a fairly nice job of presenting the story that is told in the movie and it was really fun making it.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I had fun making it.