Trailers in an Age of Internet Video

The notion of Vine-as-a-trailer makes sense to me…

I’ve always been fascinated by movie trailers. They’re such an interesting concept: a 30-second to 2-minute clip of footage that has been re-cut to maximize the piquing of interest in a full movie itself. Sometimes they’re opaque, more often they give away far too much.

The fact that they’re shown in theaters before a different movie seems counterintuitive. There have been so many movies I’ve sat through where I wished I was watching the movie I had just seen in the trailer instead. It’s effectively an advertisement, but it’s the one type of advertisement I never want to miss. I always get to a movie in time to make sure I can see the trailers. The fact that trailers are now “released” to much fanfare these days shows that I’m not alone.

I was thinking about this today in the context of Vine’s just-announced changes to offer video creators a canvas of up to 140-seconds (or longer if they’re partners). The service, which I was a seed investor in way back in the day, before it sold to Twitter, has always been built around the six-second video. When it launched in 2012/2013, this limit made a lot of sense as video was not as prevalent as it is today on the internet. There was a huge barrier to entry in making interesting video, and Vine alleviated much of that with the six-second rule. Like Twitter’s own 140-character limit before it, restriction knocked down a barrier to publishing and bred creativity.

But it also did something else. In those earlier days, numerous startups and even large companies had tried and failed to do mobile video right. Most failed not only because of creation, but because of consumption itself. Even if you could find a good enough cellular connection to stream a longer video, it was often tedious to sit through watching one on a small screen in an app or on the web often not optimized for that video-viewing experience. Again, Vine alleviated some of this pressure with the six-second rule.

So I was glad to read today that they’re not totally abandoning that legacy (much as I am glad with Twitter not abandoning its 140-character legacy), but rather leveraging it in a new, clever way. As they note:

We’re staying true to who we are. Vines are a format to squeeze the most funny, beautiful, breathtaking moments into. Defying traditional narrative with their format, they’re a lot like trailers. And like a great trailer, they make you want to watch the movie.

With this beta release, a Vine can now be a trailer that points directly to a mini-movie.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Given my preamble above, I’ve always found it odd that the equivalent of a movie trailer hasn’t existed for internet video. This is even more surprising for such video watched on mobile devices. That’s effectively what Vine is experimenting with.

I have heard of/seen services that try to automatically create trailers from longer footage. That may ultimately make sense as AI and computer vision continue to get better. But maybe not. Maybe it should be like movie trailers themselves, which, as noted above, are footage re-edited in a compelling way for a shorter context. Or, what if it would be even better to do the “trailer” as different content altogether, that whets an appetite?

Certainly, we’re going to need something like that with the proliferation of live video, thanks to services like Periscope, which I was also a seed investor in and also sold to Twitter before it launched — damn you, Twitter ;) Because there’s no chance to edit live video before it gets sent to the world, editing some sort of trailer for such footage after the fact makes sense to me.

The question is if these trailers can become (or in Vine’s case, remain) an artform themselves. If they can become ballyhooed in their own right.

Complete aside: I used to run a website that was predicated around movie trailer reviews, affectionately called “Trashing Trailers”. These days, when I get a free moment, I try to write movie reviews in haiku format — appropriately called Review in Haiku — and I often think of these as “trailers” to a full movie review. Which I also hope to do one day :)