I thought there was a clear smoking gun reason it has become popular but it doesn't seem entirely clear cut. Except that the blue/teal makes orange (and skin) "pop" as the colors are complementary, and color swapping/enhancing has become much easier in recent years. (And I think, somewhat cynically, because both hues are both pretty far from the default green screen color...)
Well done! I was expecting less, to be honest. I liked how the article noted that colors can carry antithetical qualities, depending on the context. Since the context is cultural, it would be interesting to extend the study to other countries.
I feel like me and the author of this piece have different opinions about where to put the line that separates orange from yellow.
If you showed me many of the posters shown here in isolation, and asked me to describe the palette, I would have said "that's a yellow poster": https://stephenfollows.com/i/171004131/orange-the-mvp-of-the... - with some exceptions such as Lorax and Unbelievers that I would have said are orange.
EDIT: I changed from "most of the posters" to "many of the posters" as there are some that feel to me decidedly orange.
* How the colors were picked and assigned to each category and (e.g. at what point is red pink and no longer red)
* An indication of distribution in charts, they have different scales on the y-axis.
* The author likely sampled posters with mostly the same color above a given threshold for each category, would that (together with the lack of methodology and error bars) heavily skews the reader's presentation of the data analysis?
Although it's an interesting attempt, the first genre I thought of doesn't seem to fit the analysis. The predominant color scheme of classic horror was green and purple. TFA notes how green can connote the weird, but doesn't recognize the prominent role of purple in classic horror.
This might be because of two color processes (e.g. two strip technicolor or cinemascope) which were cheaper and excluded either yellows or blue hues. Purple (or magenta for bright spots) also is complementary to green so they tend to be used together.
Personally I always associated sickly yellow and greens with horror, but that seems to have been a trend perhaps.
> The first measure I tracked was a ‘Colourfulness score’. This measures how intense and varied the colours are in a poster. Higher values mean the image contains more saturated and diverse colours, while lower values indicate a more muted or monochrome palette.
As the description suggests, it seems to me these are actually two things: one is how saturated the colors are and one is how diverse they are. In other words one is how much color there is and one is how many colors there are. The examples given for each color later on are ones where a single color predominates, but it's not clear from the article how common this pattern is.
Personally I'm intrigued by posters that use a wider palette. Subjectively it feels to me that movie posters have moved towards a minimalist design over the past 10-20 years (as have book covers), making single colors more central, but I'm not sure whether that hunch would be borne out by data.
Looking at the "Brightness Contrast Score", clearly dark posters are on the left - even those with high contrast like 2nd, 4th, 5th poster, whereas the "high contrast" is often given to a very bright poster that happens to have a black background footer.
In the red section they speak about red on white in comedy, but then have a separate section for posters with white backgrounds, some with red text overlay.
I wonder to what extent the color palettes of movie posters match the color palettes of the movies themselves (for those that have one), or is this mostly unrelated ?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] threadI thought there was a clear smoking gun reason it has become popular but it doesn't seem entirely clear cut. Except that the blue/teal makes orange (and skin) "pop" as the colors are complementary, and color swapping/enhancing has become much easier in recent years. (And I think, somewhat cynically, because both hues are both pretty far from the default green screen color...)
If you showed me many of the posters shown here in isolation, and asked me to describe the palette, I would have said "that's a yellow poster": https://stephenfollows.com/i/171004131/orange-the-mvp-of-the... - with some exceptions such as Lorax and Unbelievers that I would have said are orange.
EDIT: I changed from "most of the posters" to "many of the posters" as there are some that feel to me decidedly orange.
* How the colors were picked and assigned to each category and (e.g. at what point is red pink and no longer red)
* An indication of distribution in charts, they have different scales on the y-axis.
* The author likely sampled posters with mostly the same color above a given threshold for each category, would that (together with the lack of methodology and error bars) heavily skews the reader's presentation of the data analysis?
Personally I always associated sickly yellow and greens with horror, but that seems to have been a trend perhaps.
I did wonder about one thing:
> The first measure I tracked was a ‘Colourfulness score’. This measures how intense and varied the colours are in a poster. Higher values mean the image contains more saturated and diverse colours, while lower values indicate a more muted or monochrome palette.
As the description suggests, it seems to me these are actually two things: one is how saturated the colors are and one is how diverse they are. In other words one is how much color there is and one is how many colors there are. The examples given for each color later on are ones where a single color predominates, but it's not clear from the article how common this pattern is.
Personally I'm intrigued by posters that use a wider palette. Subjectively it feels to me that movie posters have moved towards a minimalist design over the past 10-20 years (as have book covers), making single colors more central, but I'm not sure whether that hunch would be borne out by data.
I'm guessing a lot of green and blue.
We went from black-and-white to color to blue-and-orange cinema.