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Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

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81–90 of 114 posts

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#81
post #5

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.

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

Visually and aurally that movie was astounding. Story and pacing felt a little disjointed though.

One of the few times I think I prefer watching the trailer to the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ertVYn750

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#82
post #34
post #4

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 doin…

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.

Soderbergh recently did a recut of 2001 to make it less 'obvious'...

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#83
Final Cut Pro X literally has an effect called "Teal and Orange": https://www.dropbox.com/s/kdbub5jctmn4lqh/Screenshot%202015-...

I applied it to one of my (totally amateur) drone videos (https://vimeo.com/95716566) and thought it looked kind of "good", now I know why.

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#84
This is all a little bizarre, as these are my two favourite colours, especially in combination. As a teenager getting to paint my walls my own colours for the first time, I chose orange walls with blue trim. I had not idea it was so prevalent in movie-making!

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amelie was DI'd. It was digitally graded by Didier le Fouest

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 90…

I think pleasentville kinda disproves that...

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#86

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. 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…

What movies are those from?

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#87
post #78

gold 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…

Maybe somewhat ironically, this assumed association with quality without an associated real correlation with quality leads to crap trying to pass itself off as amazing stuff by using such techniques. This then leads to an association with crap rather than the quality they intended....

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tawdry

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#88
post #5

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.

The British show Utopia also used various colors to great effect in different scene to represent different themes/interests.

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#89
post #77
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.'

Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

#90
post #77
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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".

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