US_Film_Trailers_Barcodes_Sample

Explore this data set for yourself via a Shiny app here: http://nickredfern.shinyapps.io/colour_palletes_US_trailers

This data set contains the smoothed barcodes of 173 trailers nominated for a Golden Trailer award between 2016 and 2019 across nine genres: action, animation/family, comedy, documentary, drama, fantasy/adventure, horror, romance, and thriller.

Trailers receiving multiple nominations are not included in the sample, ruling out three trailers nominated in more than one category (Long Shot – ‘This Guy’, A Star is Born – ‘Not Alone’, and Us – ‘International Trailer’). One trailer (Adrift – ‘Bon Voyage’) was nominated in the romance category in consecutive years and is included in the sample once only.

All trailers were pre-processed to trim MPAA tag screens and YouTube channel promotional materials, and cropped to remove letterbox blanking.

To generate representations of colours in each trailer in the sample, I produced the smoothed barcode of each trailer using Melvyn Laïly’s Movie Barcode Generator. This software takes an input video file and extracts 1000 individual frames which are then reduced to a single pixel’s width and stacked together, with each column representing a frame from the film. The Movie Barcode Generator generates unsmoothed and smoothed barcodes from a video file, with the bars in the latter the average colour of the bars in the original version. Only the smoothed versions are included in this data set. All barcodes are Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files.

The sample is described in the file US_Film_Trailers_Barcodes_Sample_Summary.csv, which contains the title of the film promoted, the title of the trailer, the trailer production company, the genre, the URL for the trailer video (all URLs were correct as of 18 February 2021), and the filename of the barcode of the trailer.