My girlfriend and I noticed this in 2001 with the movies "Sword Fish" and "Traffic", We made fun of it and called it the cool movie filter. lol.
Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#72In 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.
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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#73One thing that isn't mentioned is that realism doesn't seem "cinematic." It's just like people not liking high frame rate because of the "soap opera effect," or even some people's preference for black and white. Visible grain, non-subtle bokeh effects and lens flare, etc are other things that aren't realistic per se, but for some reason they make it seem less "cheap" and bring more emotional weight than a more perfectly realistic image.
I think these sorts of forced palettes do the same thing. Maybe a different color combination will become trendy at some point, but for now, orange/blue is a pretty safe bet that it will achieve the emotional effect, without it just looking weird.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#74In 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.
It's not a great film from a storytelling perspective, but I think Beyond the Black Rainbow is a fantastic example of this sort of use of color
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#75A few years ago there was a good article on Cracked (of all places) about the annoying trends for movies: 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...
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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those priceonomics guys really care for their SEO. They are one of the few websites that writes totally unrelated articles to sell a product. I kind of feel used when I see them pop up.
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 try…
I miss the price guide :-)
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can see a comparison here: 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.
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?
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#78gold and blue, due to the price of the paint components, were hallmark of an expensive art painting through the history until very recently. Thus using those colors allows to exploit that association and puts your movie at perceived level of the old masterpieces.
That also correlates nicely with the fact that cheap or produced in other countries inferior color film (like in the USSR for example) didn't have good blue, was reddish-greenish instead, and thus this gold/blue of today also suggests associations with better quality.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#791950s films looked washed out. Little green in outdoors Westerns or indoors movies.
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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#80Ironically, 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. 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…
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.