Trailerscope

What defines a trailer? How is it constructed, and why does it make a film appear exciting? Are there dramaturgical patterns that have emerged over decades and can be made visible? Under the semester theme “Access to Movies,” we explored these questions in depth.

Through an iterative design and development process, this exploration led to Trailerscope — a visual investigation that examines the anatomy of film trailers using four example movies. The visualizations reveal which scenes make up a trailer, how they relate to the timeline of the full film, and what narrative patterns emerge in the process.

At the center, the trailer plays, surrounded by its timeline. Each segment represents a scene that appears in the film. Lines connect these scenes to their corresponding moments in the film (outer circle), revealing how the trailer is assembled.

The brightness of the lines indicates how much the scenes in the trailer deviate temporally from the film. Scenes that exist only in the trailer appear in gray. The outer color ring summarizes the film’s color design frame by frame, enhancing its visual recognizability.