Funny to see Amelie there as a counter-example - it's pretty much my favourite movie, and one of the things I love about it is the autumnal quality of the light. Normally I wouldn't notice that kind of thing at all, perhaps it's the contrast with all the orange-and-blues (or maybe just the exceptional loveliness of the film itself)
On the director's commentary, at 21:50, he talks about pushing the digital grading and that "sometimes it's a little bit too much." (But obviously he didn't tone it back!)
The teal-and-orange plague followed from DI[0]. Amélie predates the widespread use of DI, and DI's later compromission by the TaO plague. So it probably isn't the contrast, most of the movies from the time (and before it) would have similar non-TaO palettes (unless they were specifically going for it, as in Blade Runner)
It was DI'd, but it was created at the beginnings of DI. What I tried to express is that the excesses of a new format/technique/… don't instantly follow its introduction, there's a lag until a herd decides that's something to do. Same as the loudness wars: the Red Book was published in 1982 but excessive compressions started in earnest in the early-to-mid 90s blossoming into low single-digit dBFS by the end of the 90s-early 00s.
Amelie uses a lot of red and green. Jean-Pierre Jeunet made "City of Lost Children" which also has a strong red green palette. He also directed "Delicatessen" that used a chemical process to give the film a gold glow.
One movie that seemed to play with color to a fantastic effect is Traffic - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/
I noticed when it came out that color played a subtle role in setting the mood of each scene and aspect. For instance, near the border towns and where where the "hot zone" of illegal drug traffic occurred, it was more yellow/orange tinted. Then when you head back to the suburbs and see privileged kids doing drugs in their large homes, the color was much more blue and lighting was much softer. I wish that more movies would employ tricks like this without using a "template"...
edit: looked on IMDB and it looks like 3 different films stocks were used:
To achieve a distinctive look for each different vignette in the story, Steven Soderbergh used three different film stocks (and post-production techniques), each with their own color treatment and grain for the print. The "Wakefield" story features a colder, bluer tone to match the sad, depressive emotion. The "Ayala" story is bright, shiny, and saturated in primary colors, especially red, to match the glitzy surface of Helena's life. The "Mexican" story appears grainy, rough, and hot to go with the rugged Mexican landscape and congested cities.
Side-note: Soderbergh's editing is absolutely fantastic and original too (see: The Limey, Out of Sight). Fine, fine film-maker, one of the few to be able to cross from pure art film to Hollywood blockbuster and back again through everything in between with ease. It will be interesting to see where his "retirement" takes him.
In The Matrix, you could tell which "world" you're in by the general grade of color. When in the Matrix, everything had a greenish overtone, and when in the "real world" it was more blue. I really liked that use of color to be a part of the story telling process.
Interesting. Being partially colour blind I would have thought that the original was much greener, while the re-release is a lot bluer and bumped up the brightness contrast.
For example, most of the agent scenes in that comparison the left frame appears "greener" (but also more washed out in terms of brightness contrast) than the right.
I'm in the same boat: it's weird seeing the comments describing the blu-ray as "green-ray" and that things are SO GREEN when I literally can't see it. For those of you with decent color sight, was the original... more orange?
The original looks more green-orange and flat. The blu-ray looks more green-blue and contrasted. The original feels 'warm' and the blu-ray feels 'cool.'
Ah, that explains it. I'm technically green deficient. Because of how colour vision works, green perception partially overlaps with red perception[0], so I tend to think of green as more of an "earth tone" (essentially brown).
Colloquially people with normal vision tend to say "green" when they refer to teal (i.e. green-blue or just generally green with some blue in it). Because I don't actually perceive the green part of the hue, the blue is much stronger for me.
I absolutely agree with the "warm" vs "cool" thing, though.
> Because I don't actually perceive the green part of the hue, the blue is much stronger for me.
Interesting. Yes that's the opposite the effect it has in me. Teal is a washed-out blue...
The original/DVD release of the Matrix did have a visually distinctive green tint in the scenes taking place inside the Matrix. But it felt soft, warm, and flat. It was also subdued in some scenes, such as the training dojo. The scenes in the real world lacked the filter and felt harsh, cold, and rigid by comparison. It was a great artistic choice.
The new blu-ray release (and the sequels) have the entire movie feel like the harsh, cold, rigid reality, and have heightened the contrast to make it worse :(
There was a bit of a green hue in places in the original, but not as pronounced as in the "green-ray" version.
When I first saw the blu-ray version I had to check my TV colour settings to make sure no-one had been fiddling with them (colour saturation, temp etc). It was quite jarring on the eyes, and that was even after three or four years of not having watched The Matrix. As a non colour blind viewer my reaction (after checking the TV settings etc) was, "yeesh".
Ugh. I can see why they wanted to move more in the green/blue direction from the very red/monotone original, but it definitely looks like they went too far. Both sides of that comparison look pretty awful at times.
This. Their use of color grading is one of the things that made The Matrix have a very unique feel. The sound design is also worth paying attention to.
I also find that the lack of money forced the grittiness that was lacking in the second and third movies, and in a lot of high budget movies that attempt "edginess" like that.
In my opinion the pill scene [1] has everything that made The Matrix unique. The color, lightning, costumes, ambience (rain and thunder outside), surgical use of soundtrack and the dialogue itself. All the elements successfully contribute to give it that comicbook/cyberpunk feel.
In contrast, the sequels don't have such simple but striking scenes like that.
The 1984 version of 1984 had an intentional "washed out" appearance to reflect the grimness of the world it was showing - apparently done by a bleach bypass done to each print:
That's definitely the part of the movie i remember most, 16 years later: that feeling of flatness in the matrix that they emphasized by the green and black. You'll also notice, if you go back and watch it, that everything in the matrix is angular and well defined where as in the Nebuchadnezzar everything is curved and messy with pipes and wires leading to nowhere in every shot.
Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000) made heavy use of this, too, to distinguish different locales and parts of the story. The Mexico/Benicio Del Toro partions were heavy on gold/orange, burnt, sepia, while the Washington/Michael Douglas parts were blue, cool.
Another example of this is the the show Fringe, which used a tint (blue or red) to indicate information about where a scene took place. (Keeping it a little vague to not include spoilers.)
I've always wondered if part of the reason for the blue/green shift beyond storytelling was due to blue/green screens used heavily throughout the movie.
I would imagine it helps smooth some rough edges during the compositing phase when the overall grade matches the color key.
They also do this in a TV series called "Charlie Jade." In the show there are three known universes and each has its own distinct color and hue. You know which one you're looking at by the color change alone. It really helps keep the universes (and by extension, the timeline and story) straight.
I remember that the book "The Neverending Story" also employed a similar scheme: Red and green ink was used to distinguish between the book's two worlds.
One of the most interesting exceptions I've seen on this convention was the 2011 movie Limitless(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219289/). They still used the orange-blue complement, but switched saturation between them, sometimes every scene. It was used as an indicator of how the protagonist views the world: bright and with an orange saturation for when he is on NZT, dull and blue when he isn't. I thought it was a great way of deconstructing this particular trope.
To join in, I too loved the use of color in Limitless. I personally associate vibrant autumnal colors with clarity, not sharp blues, so when the characters go on NZT, it feels fuller, not just sharper. It looks like something a person would actually want, as opposed to losing one's humanity in a soul-crushing washed-out green or blue usually seen in sci-fi.
An interesting persuasive technique here: When they linked to "some filmmakers" not using this scheme my guess before clicking was it would be to a scene in The Grand Budapest Hotel. I've never thought about color in film before so this didn't feel like it should be an easy guess unless the article is correct about how pervasive orange/blue is, so when it loaded and it was correct it added a lot of emotional force to the argument. Though I suspect it is actually a pretty easy guess: they didn't choose a random film, they chose an extreme, recent, popular counterexample to their argument. I'd bet my mind was already thinking about that movie in the background while trying to come up with counterexamples, and they successfully turned this into enforcing their argument rather than the opposite.
Using a web search engine is asking for rankings based on web structure, not rankings based on product quality.
You might think it's bad to take advantage of that, but refraining from doing so doesn't likely yield a fair product quality ranking, just some different unfair rating.
I work at Priceonomics, so maybe I can shed light on our motivations.
We make the kind of content we love and we sell products so that we can afford to make more of that content. The two products we actually sell (data crawling for companies and books for people) aren't particularly well-suited toward SEO (though our original idea, a Price Guide which we killed years ago, was).
Anyhow, we're a content site that's trying to get by without using ads. I think most of our regular readers appreciate we're trying to pay the bills by selling things instead using ads. We'd like to avoid jamming our site with advertising if that's possible.
I was just about to post this link as well. Glad someone else had the same thought. Cracked, while an absurd humor site on the surface, is one of the most reliable resources of new-perspective intellectual stimulation on the web, IMO.
After I read that post it took something away from a lot of films for me, since it was hard to not notice. In this context, ignorance is bliss I say! I wish I could go back to not noticing.
I see it as just another way of understanding a tool in a filmmakers box better. You can gain a deeper appreciation for a film by understanding how and why an element, be it sound, color, framing, or anything else, was chosen by the director and film crew.
I'm not totally opposed to the idea since there's an artistic goal behind it. Kinda like Instagram filters, which I admittedly used to oppose, but for Instagram's purpose, which isn't vying for National Geographic awards, they work well.
> There's no specific colour decision-making process where we sit in a room and say, 'We're only going to use complementary colours to try and move the audience in a particular direction – and only use those combinations.'
A lot of production designers would strongly disagree with this statement. The color palette of a film is very much a part of the decision-making process (pre-production as well as post-production), and it's used primarily to "move the audience" in one way or another, as per the film's theme and story elements.
It may just be that the colors within a chosen palette are often classified as either "warm" or "cool" - orange and blue being the most obvious manifestations of those classifications - so we tend to see a lot of them. Without contrast (literal and figurative), a film simply doesn't say anything. Warm and cool colors go a long way in helping the audience feel positively or negatively about certain story elements.
Right. There are also those color houses that standardize more or less the worlds palette for the next few years. It is not an accident that we all had avocado refrigerators and green minivans. It is a truly big brother industry.
Upon re-reading this quote and its source article, I believe he was probably referring to moviemaking at a more meta level; i.e., there's no decision-making process wherein all (or many) filmmakers discuss and agree upon a narrow choice of colors to use across all of their films. As the quote continues, "[e]very film has its own look."
I inferred "we" as meaning a single production team. It makes much more sense if "we" refers to filmmakers as a whole.
Full Metal Jacket had it's moments of blue and orange, but I'd classify most scenes in the film as 'green'. Then again, Kubrick was known to be obsessive in regards to attention to detail, especially when it came to lighting and colour reproduction.
Probably a limitation of the color film stock at the time. Technicolor used a beam splitter and three strips of black-and-white film. It made super-vivid colors but was expensive. Single-strip color film rose to the top in the 50s and 60s with worse colors, but much cheaper and easier to shoot.
The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn movie from 1938, is an excellent example of three-strip Technicolor, and on blu-ray some scenes look like they were shot last week, not 80 years ago.
When I shoot portraits of people with a flash I will sometimes use an orange gel to give people's skin a more human look. White flash tends to take that out of the final picture but the orange gel makes skin look more natural.
Ironically, teal and orange reached its peak with tranformers. With the rise of RED cameras (which have useless colour reproduction) we've gone the opposite way, low contrast, lots of grain.
Fun fact, virtually any special effects movie that you've seen since 2000, all the film grain you see, is faked. So the people who bemoan the loss of grain with the move to digital need to reassess what they are saying:
I'm curious about what the makes the colour reproduction useless. Based on the low contrast comment, I'm guessing it has to do with the log color space?
It's true to a point, the RED isn't the best camera at reproducing colours. But then again most of the time you're going to be filming in RAW so it doesn't really matter as much since you get a flat image in post that you can grade.
An advantage the RED cameras have say over a Alexa is that they can film in 4k,5k,6k (Alexa only shoots in 2k). So that you can get a sharper image by editing in 6k, and then exporting in 4k or 1080p.
If you look at video cams for projects that need to be finished quickly, of course your not going to choose a RED. Canon Cinema Cameras (c100, c300) have the best colour science out of everyone (Sony and Panasonic are known to have pretty average colour reproduction). The only downfall with Canon cameras is that they use crappy codes and compression so when you start pushing to extreme looks, you'll get alot of noise and loose sharpness in your footage.
I use Blackmagic cameras, which aren't know for their colours either, but they own the industry standard grading software (DaVinci), so it is quite easy to get your footage balanced before you do a grade.
I am the guy who did that paint shot you linked to above.
I think you might have mis-understood a part of my post. We don't replace all of the film grain. We go to great lengths to try and maintain as much of the original grain as possible. We certainly add grain to anything we add to a shot but we go to great lengths to match the grain we add to the original grain.
In the example you linked to, I did completely remove the grain from the image before I started to paint out the wire (the painting softens and blurs the grain). But I then took only the areas of the image that I changed with the painting, and but that over the original image, with the original grain on. I then only added 'fake' grain to the areas that I had painted.
The grain that we do add to the visual effects isn't usually 'fake' either. The visual effect supervisor usually takes the cameras that production was using on set and shoots grain samples on the same film stock. We then add these samples back to our VFX work so they match the original footage.
We all so have to do exactly the same with footage that comes from digital cameras but this is more 'noise' than grain. And if the footage came from a compressed source like a GoPro we have to match compression artifacts.
While working at a tv distribution company about 8 years ago, I used to design these promotional one-pagers for various shows. After a while I noticed all of my designs were mostly blue and orange (or at least the main components of the design were). Then I started consciously trying to use other colour arrangements but orange-blue just always sort of looked best. I celebrated any time i managed to get a good looking poster/one-pager without relying on the orange-blue complementary contrast.
I wonder if women might have an advantage here due to many men being red-green colour blind to some extent.
Kubrick was always masterful with colour, and while he is probably best known for his fascination with red [1], it's actually the orange/blue contrast in "Eyes Wide Shut" that is most memorable for me.
Drive has some great usage of this type of cinematography if I recall correctly. I think the author may have ruined watching movies for me now though. :/
Recently when watching stuff on Netflix I found myself amazed at how ridiculously orange and teal movies were getting. Even the pilot episode of House was ridiculously Orange'n'Teal.
Then I twigged it was because I was running F.Lux.
113 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadFor me Amelie is a movie I watch when I feel like there is no hope for humanity, it is the one movie that restores it just a little bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYfo3nt-O_U
It's a fine film, but the grading is rather extreme. It does the opposite for the war scenes, which are quite desaturated.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_intermediate
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-uxeZaM-VM
edit: looked on IMDB and it looks like 3 different films stocks were used:
To achieve a distinctive look for each different vignette in the story, Steven Soderbergh used three different film stocks (and post-production techniques), each with their own color treatment and grain for the print. The "Wakefield" story features a colder, bluer tone to match the sad, depressive emotion. The "Ayala" story is bright, shiny, and saturated in primary colors, especially red, to match the glitzy surface of Helena's life. The "Mexican" story appears grainy, rough, and hot to go with the rugged Mexican landscape and congested cities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtktg9hbC_g
I do think they over-egged the pudding in the Blu-ray release. In some scenes Neo's skin tones look awful.
For example, most of the agent scenes in that comparison the left frame appears "greener" (but also more washed out in terms of brightness contrast) than the right.
Colloquially people with normal vision tend to say "green" when they refer to teal (i.e. green-blue or just generally green with some blue in it). Because I don't actually perceive the green part of the hue, the blue is much stronger for me.
I absolutely agree with the "warm" vs "cool" thing, though.
[0]: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/images/huma... (the fourth "pigment", Rhodopsin, is what we use in low-light conditions)
Interesting. Yes that's the opposite the effect it has in me. Teal is a washed-out blue...
The original/DVD release of the Matrix did have a visually distinctive green tint in the scenes taking place inside the Matrix. But it felt soft, warm, and flat. It was also subdued in some scenes, such as the training dojo. The scenes in the real world lacked the filter and felt harsh, cold, and rigid by comparison. It was a great artistic choice.
The new blu-ray release (and the sequels) have the entire movie feel like the harsh, cold, rigid reality, and have heightened the contrast to make it worse :(
EDIT: I have no color blindness.
When I first saw the blu-ray version I had to check my TV colour settings to make sure no-one had been fiddling with them (colour saturation, temp etc). It was quite jarring on the eyes, and that was even after three or four years of not having watched The Matrix. As a non colour blind viewer my reaction (after checking the TV settings etc) was, "yeesh".
In contrast, the sequels don't have such simple but striking scenes like that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te6qG4yn-Ps
ps: or not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four_%28film%29...
I suspect Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves did something similar as well - it had quite a distinct look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Waves
http://i.imgur.com/PXMGX.jpg
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119644/?ref_=nv_sr_1 - Fringe (2008)
I would imagine it helps smooth some rough edges during the compositing phase when the overall grade matches the color key.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_%282002_film%29
One of the few times I think I prefer watching the trailer to the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ertVYn750
See, for example, https://greaterthanknowledge.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/an-ins...
The book was published in 1979. It would be fun to hear of similar techniques used even earlier.
I hope we get a more natural dynamic range of color in the future.
edit: why the downvotes? it's actually in the article
> Most skin tones fall somewhere between pale peach and dark, dark brown, leaving them squarely in the orange segment of any color wheel
http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-poster...
based off a reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/comments/a8mqz
Reddit seems to be the go-to source for 'original' blog content these days.
I kind of feel used when I see them pop up.
You might think it's bad to take advantage of that, but refraining from doing so doesn't likely yield a fair product quality ranking, just some different unfair rating.
Our fitness function is broken.
We make the kind of content we love and we sell products so that we can afford to make more of that content. The two products we actually sell (data crawling for companies and books for people) aren't particularly well-suited toward SEO (though our original idea, a Price Guide which we killed years ago, was).
Anyhow, we're a content site that's trying to get by without using ads. I think most of our regular readers appreciate we're trying to pay the bills by selling things instead using ads. We'd like to avoid jamming our site with advertising if that's possible.
Happy to answer any questions you have.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18664_5-annoying-trends-that-...
There is the orange and teal trend, but also color trends by genre, and of course lens flares...
After I read that post it took something away from a lot of films for me, since it was hard to not notice. In this context, ignorance is bliss I say! I wish I could go back to not noticing.
A lot of production designers would strongly disagree with this statement. The color palette of a film is very much a part of the decision-making process (pre-production as well as post-production), and it's used primarily to "move the audience" in one way or another, as per the film's theme and story elements.
It may just be that the colors within a chosen palette are often classified as either "warm" or "cool" - orange and blue being the most obvious manifestations of those classifications - so we tend to see a lot of them. Without contrast (literal and figurative), a film simply doesn't say anything. Warm and cool colors go a long way in helping the audience feel positively or negatively about certain story elements.
Colour usually is considered right at the start, as dperfet correctly points out.
I inferred "we" as meaning a single production team. It makes much more sense if "we" refers to filmmakers as a whole.
http://emertainmentmonthly.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/in... (warning, 5k image)
http://applications.creativeengland.co.uk/assets/public/reda... note the softness on james corden's face, thats most likely someone painting out blemishes.
Fun fact, virtually any special effects movie that you've seen since 2000, all the film grain you see, is faked. So the people who bemoan the loss of grain with the move to digital need to reassess what they are saying:
http://conradolson.com/frame-by-frame-painting
An advantage the RED cameras have say over a Alexa is that they can film in 4k,5k,6k (Alexa only shoots in 2k). So that you can get a sharper image by editing in 6k, and then exporting in 4k or 1080p.
If you look at video cams for projects that need to be finished quickly, of course your not going to choose a RED. Canon Cinema Cameras (c100, c300) have the best colour science out of everyone (Sony and Panasonic are known to have pretty average colour reproduction). The only downfall with Canon cameras is that they use crappy codes and compression so when you start pushing to extreme looks, you'll get alot of noise and loose sharpness in your footage.
I use Blackmagic cameras, which aren't know for their colours either, but they own the industry standard grading software (DaVinci), so it is quite easy to get your footage balanced before you do a grade.
I think you might have mis-understood a part of my post. We don't replace all of the film grain. We go to great lengths to try and maintain as much of the original grain as possible. We certainly add grain to anything we add to a shot but we go to great lengths to match the grain we add to the original grain.
In the example you linked to, I did completely remove the grain from the image before I started to paint out the wire (the painting softens and blurs the grain). But I then took only the areas of the image that I changed with the painting, and but that over the original image, with the original grain on. I then only added 'fake' grain to the areas that I had painted.
The grain that we do add to the visual effects isn't usually 'fake' either. The visual effect supervisor usually takes the cameras that production was using on set and shoots grain samples on the same film stock. We then add these samples back to our VFX work so they match the original footage.
We all so have to do exactly the same with footage that comes from digital cameras but this is more 'noise' than grain. And if the footage came from a compressed source like a GoPro we have to match compression artifacts.
I wonder if women might have an advantage here due to many men being red-green colour blind to some extent.
[1]: http://vimeo.com/112129153
Then I twigged it was because I was running F.Lux.
[0] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/
[1] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/104685404787/transformer...
[2] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3432016573/traffic-2000
[3] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/8951346287/tron-legacy-2...