Trailers community chat, June 2024: Hi everybody!

Hey there Trailers community members!

Our little group has over 300 members now; plenty of folks watching it to make a meta/discussion thread worth while.

So who am I, and who are you?

I'm a middle aged film nerd with a background in technology who really appreciates the art form of a well-crafted trailer. Always did. That, and I'm simultaneously frustrated by their existential relationship to commercialism and advertising. There's a blurry line between this kind of content that effectively functions as "novel, entertaining news" vs "look at this new thing to buy".

Back in the 1990s, if you were an American with basic cable service, the E! cable network had a 30-minute weekly show called Coming Attractions that showed nothing but upcoming movie trailers for all kinds of movies, all different studios. While it wasn't perfect, it was a great venue for getting that content (and let's be clear: ads) in front the very rarest audience: people who actually WANTED to see it.

And that's basically why I wanted to create this community. The velocity of global film production has exploded. There's so much interesting stuff out there to watch! Yet, at the same time, the notification pipeline for getting the word out about these films has completely broken down. Every studio has their own website, their own social media vectors, their own streaming services and YouTube feeds. And I genuinely don't care about the vast majority of the content those sources generate. I don't want to see clips or interviews or behind-the-scenes peeks for everything - jettison the filler, just show me the trailers.

And that's what this community is meant to be: a distillation of hundreds of media sources, just pulling out the stuff that I wanted. And if I'm sorting through it all for my own satisfaction, I might as well share it with others. And I love that Lemmy has community level RSS feeds. Interoperability is sexy.

I'll save the discussion of my methodology and experimentation with automation for a future community post, but just know that the link aggregation is mostly a manual process at the moment, but one that I'm eager to make more efficient as time goes on.

So anyway, enough about me. Who are you?? Introduce yourself!