From the sepia tones of a Coen brothers film set in the Dust Bowl to a child’s red coat in Schindler’s List, filmmakers have long known the power of colour in movies. Now, computer scientists have analyzed 60 years of films to paint a picture of the past six decades in film.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo used a technique called k-means clustering to analyze the trailers for more than 29,000 North American movies released between 1960 and 2019.
“We chose to analyze trailers because they typically include many key moments from a film while also being short and accessible to the public,” said Andreea Pocol, a PhD candidate in computer science at Waterloo and co-author of the study. “Trailers give us a reliable snapshot of a film, so we can extract a lot of data efficiently.”
To read more about the study, check out the full article from Waterloo News.