The origin of the idea is to preserve skin tones and other "memory colors" (stop signs, taxi cabs), regardless of how the rest of the scene is rendered (bright or drab).
So it's not that film colorists are intentionally making everything teal and orange (or actually maybe the lazy ones are now that's it's become something of a cliche.)
I knew the gray-tone checkerboard but this is a very surprising illusion. I opened the image in Photoshop and had a hard time believing the effect: http://screenjel.ly/oHDkBcDFnoQ (video, no sound)
I found the head color correction interesting. I would say he used and overall filter rather than doing a spot correction on the head. The head becomes lighter, but it's still gray, not a Caucasian color. The sky has gone from blue to a mog induced green The most interesting are the copper pipes which have gone from copper (a memory color in my book) to a bright red.
I have watched mv GF produced stunning paintings from a limited palate of 4 to 6 colors for a painting. Once she has a sketch of a painting her next major step is designing a palate for it, including the grounds, which get completely covered up to the layers that build up the image. It's really an elaborate illusion. Is violet a skin tone? Yes, when it's a shadow that complements orange red of the skin highlights.
It's interesting that the vast majority of us would have seen all those films and never noticed... I get the feeling that now every time I watch a recent movie I'm going to be thinking of this post.
As a photographer, this post is way full of crap - look at famous photographs, and you will see the exact same thing even before the days of Photoshop.
These colors are used because they work, and they project a certain effect on your images. Blaming this on the advent of computers is disingenuous - photographers have been shooting at Golden Hour for generations to capture the contrasty orangeness since God knows when.
This is hardly a new digital phenomenon, it's done because it works. The digital editors are emulating what's been done using colored light for 90 years.
Right, but I fail to see how a valid artistic theme in photography suddenly becomes lazy me-too-ism when applied to film.
Art goes through phases - maybe there was that guy back during the Renaissance complaining about how all the sculptures looked the same, etc etc. This is simply the way art goes.
Sometimes technology makes it easier to do something, and then people do that thing more than they did before, to the point where they're doing it too much.
It's like AutoTune in music: people have always tried to sing in tune, but now they can sing even more in tune, and so current pop music has almost lost the naturalism and emotional effects produced by subtle variance in pitch.
Isn't that simply a matter of aesthetics though? I don't much like autotune either, but I'm willing to admit the possibility that it's simply because I grew up listening to a different aesthetic.
We've certainly lost a lot of aesthetics as art styles changed over time - when's the last time you saw a good tapestry? I don't see this as particularly bad, though, it's simply "the way it is" in art. Periodically we will exchange one thing for another, and life goes on.
I don't mean the T-Pain style 'AutoTune-as-an-effect' -- I mean the subtler use of AutoTune to correct minor fluctuations in a natural-sounding performance.
Yes, but instead of manipulating them separately, they apply one same filter to all the film, even frames with now face in it. Which means some frames have no contrast in them (screenshot Wolfman #2), others make irrelevant objects stand out (Hot Tub #2). Great article.
Exactly. If you light the actors with warm light, the background would become blueish. These days you just set the right color balance, before they used corrective filters (slightly blueish in this case). The result is the same.
Great find! I know that there is one other scream that I hear constantly in movies but I have no idea if it has a name... I'll have to make sure to keep an ear out for it!
There is a really annoying one that used to haunt me when being forced to enjoy watching football (soccer) with my dad: ALL video replays had the exact same audio on it. It really used to grate on me as it was really obvious once you had got used to it, but my dad could never hear it.
Just a little anecdotal evidence of my experience on this fascinating subject. Perception, attention and information are very interesting facets of psychology!
I noticed, and disliked it, and it turned me into an anti-color-grading fanatic. However I assumed it was due to trying to make movies on blu-ray look more movie-like by limiting their colors to the colors they are used to seeing on dvd as opposed to the realistic colors people see on modern HD camcorders, that might make movies look home-made or amateur.
Akin to color compression, various recent popular music is clipped into a fairly narrow range of frequencies, and with Auto-Tune filters applied to the voices.
Listening to music with a (larger) dynamic range and with little or no Auto-Tune can make the differences apparent; you start noticing similarities to the flanging effect used with the voices of the Goa'uld in Stargate series.
Like reel-change marks in the old days, once you notice this sort of stuff, you're doomed.
What really will get to you is that quite often during the reel change they'll stop the audio. Rarely does the music or sound remain continuous through the change. Quite often the new reel starts with dead silence. And just like the marks, once you notice this you'll never stop noticing it again.
I believe this trend started with "The Fifth Element", one of the first movies to use a lot of orange. That film was visually striking at the time, because Orange was such an eye-catching color. It was also avant-garde, because Orange was considered very tacky mid-ninties.
The Fifth Element came out several years before the millenium. If you'll recall, Orange was hailed by the fashion world as the color of the millenium.
Fifth Element was styled by Jean Paul Gaultier, who is one of the few avant-garde designers to reach the highest echelon of respect in the fashion world. It is because of his rare ability to combine costume and high fashion.
Disappointingly, the visual effect of The Fifth Element is now lost. Much of its shocking visual palette is now standard. Such is fashion.
He's complaining about hacky techniques in a Michael Bay movie? Outlandish! When have you ever been able to look at Hollywood blockbusters as serious art?
This whole thing smells like confirmation bias. There are plenty of movies being made with broader/different color palettes. If you chose to watch Transformers 2, that's nobody's fault but your own.
This is the visual equivalent of destructively loud mastering on popular music. It's interesting to see that the same tradeoff applies to both formats: postproduction techniques add generic excitement and "pop" to an entertainment experience, at the cost of making everything look (and sound) alike, which reduces the dynamic range of the experience.
As part of trying to become better (through necessity) at web design, I've been discovering the best way to learn about design is to find pet-peeve rants by good designers.
This one is going to give me something to chew on.
I don't like pet-peeve rants because they rarely tell you how to find something original that works. They're very quick to tell you what doesn't work, and perhaps a little bit of why, but they don't really give much insight into how to find good alternatives.
For example, if you have a lot of faces in your film, how do you make them "pop" and stand out without using lots of teal?
I should have been more clear. The rants are interesting because they highlight things that have been subtly bugging me, but I don't know why.
In this case, I scroll through and look at all of those pictures, and I know something is wrong. It takes someone with talent and experience to talk about the color balance. That gives me something concrete I can look for when I try to put together designs -- don't just go and get yourself complementary colors and then just go nuts with the contrast.
in honesty, as a designer, you should refine your own taste. Know what you like, what you don't. Be unashamed of this: it's what separates your work from others'. Once you do, you'll have 'the angry years' where you go off and rail against this or that to everyone you know (blah blah lucida blah blah poor attempt at contrast harmony blah blah composition not dynamic blah blah).
But all the while, this is developing your internal taste barometer, things you love and things you won't stand for. This will influence your work in every way possible, from things like stroke width (looks too constructivist!) to decisions about texture (halftone again?!, what is this, the 50s?)
I'll agree that it's good to keep up with what other people bitch about (gotta keep up with the zeitgeist!) but it's often funnier than informational, and more often, their posts lack substance or rally around some shallow point that you no longer care about. I mean, yes, i've seen the golden rectangle, i studied maths, but i don't buy the whole "look! look! the golden ratio is EVERYWHERE!" argument that is basically what this webpage boiled down to. But that's my own taste talking.
They won't stop. Warm-cool color combos (orange/yellow vs blue, teal vs orange, cyan vs red, steel vs red etc.) provide the most color contrast, so the picture always looks "bright" and "vivid" to a casual viewer.
BTW, the trick is far from new. Some examples that come to mind are Aliens and Terminator 2 (blue/gray vs red/orange, done via lighting) and Empire Strikes Back (again, blues vs reds/oranges -- very well nuanced across the entire movie except the Yoda swamp scenes).
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Colour Psychology or Colour Symbolism yet and how these two colours are used to illicit a desired emotional response from the viewers.
I would suggest that these colours are used rather deliberately for that very reason.
I've reposted some meanings of the two colours below for reference.
Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.
Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.
You can see this effect a lot on TV too. I think CSI began with a conscious act of manipulating the color palette via computer. Contrast that sort of color bias to rendering true colors via photography in a series such as Miami Vice (made well before there was this possibility).
Yeah I definitely noticed color and CSI. What's interesting to me is that they gave each spin-off their own color identity. The original had kind of a greenish tinge, CSI: Miami has more of a yellow/orange tint and CSI: NY has a blueish color. I think it used to be more pronounced--I don't notice it as much any more. Though perhaps I just got used to it.
It is true, colour grading has gone crazy in today's movies. I find it so amazingly distracting. Fortunately there are still some tastefully graded films being made. Even Avatar was pretty nicely coloured.
I find it ironic that this is posted here on HN, where the top color is orange. (Of course, I like teal and orange and once had a wardrobe with a lot of those two colors in it.)
Strangely enough, my topcolor is a powdery blue, at almost the opposite spot on the color wheel. I just set it to 'abcdef' when I created my HN account.
I dunno, the CSS color scheme of this site is definitely orange (and almost teal in the background, at least on my monitor). I think this is a bigger conspiracy than we imagined.
And when I got the ability to color the top nav at some N karma, I unthinkingly set it to teal (or cyan, in my words.) Now that I think about or, it really does make the Y "pop"...
The origin of the idea is to preserve skin tones and other "memory colors" (stop signs, taxi cabs), regardless of how the rest of the scene is rendered (bright or drab).
So it's not that film colorists are intentionally making everything teal and orange (or actually maybe the lazy ones are now that's it's become something of a cliche.)