Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
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Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
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Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#2Funny 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)
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#3Funny 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)
I absolutely love Amelie, and I hadn't realised that one of the reasons maybe because it is not just another orange/blue tinted movie.
For 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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#4One 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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#5In 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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#6One 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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#7I enjoyed Dead Silence, but some of the blue they do was overkill. For example: http://static.yts.re/attachments/Dead_Silence_2007/Screensho...
I hope we get a more natural dynamic range of color in the future.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#8In 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.
Just as a note, the green grading was made stronger in releases after the original DVD.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#9An 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.
Re: Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue
#10In 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.
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.