btw all movies look appalling now

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/orangeandteal.jpg

ever since i read about the orange and teal thing it is like i cant watch anything because of how shitty and gross they look

the white ribbon looks great amirite

(it does, too!)

Sub-topic for thread: recent colour movies that look great. Go!

Lars von Trier used orange and teal pretty effectively in his early post-apocalyptic noir Element of Crime (1984).

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3023/3013199012_4b762f24b4.jpg

I'd agree that unmotivated use of digital color timing is usually bad.

for reference

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-part-2.html

The orange and teal thing has been a peeve of mine for a couple years now. I'm glad people are catching on to it... maybe if enough moviegoers proclaim that it is a shit color scheme they will stop doing everything in it.

It made sense in Tron though... the two factions were Orange and Blue... but mostly my reaction is just "ugh come on make shit look real, like 70s film!" I am so tired of hyperrealistic film treatments in things that aren't like sci-fi or fantasy.

I'm grading my movie next month, I'll bear this in mind

why did you make a movie

why does any man do anything. it's the journey, not the destination.

I understand why the orange and teal thing is annoying and lazy, but I don't think the treatment itself necessarily looks bad.

I read about this phenon. on /film regarding movie posters but had no idea it applied to the color palettes of the films themselves as well.
http://talkingship.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Avatar-Movie-Poster.jpg
and this came up as well, exhibiting the same:
http://liguified.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/avatar_poster2.jpg
showing that the effect trickles down to promo shots for kids cartoons.

http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/sports/NFLmiamidolphins/NFL_miami_dolphins_1.jpg

is that from boy in the striped pyjamas?

what is source of 'orange and teal thing'?

Soderbergh

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q2z1M3wzz-Q/S53GmDjxpNI/AAAAAAAAAMY/YHVf-zEF3TA/s320/mona-lisa+copy.jpg

As it happens, DaVinci Systems is responsible for most high end digital color grading hardware.

I'd never conciously noticed this before, but as soon as I saw the images on that blog, it was like "oh yeah, that". Once it's brought to your attention, I guess it's going to leap out at you all the time. In that, it reminds me of digital brickwall mastering in music - I doubt I'm the first person who's made that comparison, somehow - which makes me think it's not going away anytime soon.

The other thing that it reminds me of is the old 2-strip technicolor process from the 20's and very early '30s, example:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3243/2849002169_859b8f92d9.jpg

I guess they had an excuse in that there was nothing else available. Also, the 2 colours they used were prettier I guess? The screengrabs in that blog are pretty garish & ugly. I wonder if they'll wind up remastering classic films using that aesthetic.

shasta otm

ahahaha this thread

I'd never conciously noticed this before, but as soon as I saw the images on that blog, it was like "oh yeah, that". Once it's brought to your attention, I guess it's going to leap out at you all the time

otm

I've ranted about it before but there's also that desaturated color thing where all the reds look like pinks and everything else looks grey and drab. Started with Saving Private Ryan I think and just continued to be Hollywood's stock signifier for "gritty".

The orange/teal thing seems to have popped up pretty recently

destroy flickr

lol so the first video of any kind that i've watched since i read this article 10 mins ago is tonight's episode of the daily show & oh what's this, it's a promo for "the onion sports network"

http://i53.tinypic.com/2j363bs.png

oh god that blog post ruined my life

http://i51.tinypic.com/2n15i08.png

half of his posts are: HOW DARE SOMEONE COMBINE WHITE PEOPLE WITH SKY

i mean i get the legitimate problems in transformers, tron and hot-tub etc. and i don't like it but you know, a couple films spread over a few years have a certain colour scheme- omg its the end of cinema

and you know if his biggest problem with hottub time machine is the colouring...

half of his posts are: HOW DARE SOMEONE COMBINE WHITE PEOPLE WITH SKY

well, I did sort of think that myself about some of the shots, but then I clicked on this flickr link from the comments:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/romanmphotography/4430898117/
and went "ohhh yeah, that's what real flesh and sky looks like, and that is what movies look like now, gotcha"

Having read those blog posts, this trailer is hilarious I must admit:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/lions_gate/brothers/

I like the odd red or purple garment, seemingly left in to provide some contrast from the otherwise totally orange/brown/teal spectrum.

by the way, i keep hearing "teal & orange" in my head to the tune of wiz khalifa's "black & yellow"

half of his posts are: HOW DARE SOMEONE COMBINE WHITE PEOPLE WITH SKY

i mean i get the legitimate problems in transformers, tron and hot-tub etc. and i don't like it but you know, a couple films spread over a few years have a certain colour scheme- omg its the end of cinema

lol just watch a couple movied and notice "y is the sky that color?"

like this will ruin all movies now and is way more widespread

fair enough. i wasn't exactly looking for colour realism in transformers 2. in fact i was disappointed at how much dialogue it had, so that seems even further down the list of probs

there is already a thread abt this btw - teal & orange.xls

love the bbc show that someone links to

yah this is not "stylisation" btw, its a cheap, gimmicky and lazy misuse of intro to color theory

are u kidding me with this? orange and blue are complementary that's why tv uses blue behind people shots.

bumblee is supposed to be yellow
tron is totally all about the blue v orange

multiple xposts: I hear it to the tune of the mountain goats' pink and blue.

keep on reading the thread title as 'btw all movies look appealing now'

i knew that as soon as this became a thing to notice that people would start bitching about it to an unreasonable degree - this only 'ruins' movies if you're a literal baby who can't pay attention to the story and characters - everyone wants to seem clued in and knowledgeable so they'll start bitching about color grading the same way they bitch about 'bad' CGI, handheld camerawork, or stock sound effects. True Grit and I'm Not There are a couple of movies I've seen recently that went nuts with the digital color grading and it didn't make them worse movies at all - and in True Grit's case, it was better for it. it's just a tool.

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/101103/mat-damon-true-grit_320.jpg

it's still silly tho

Yes, only babies care about how a film looks. Let's fire all the cinematographers while we're at it. And who needs film scores? Or good actors? I mean, god, movies should really just be audio books all read by some dude with a nasal voice. I mean, it's all about the characters and the story.

yeah, but it's a tool, like any other, that can do damage when used incorrectly, or just plain thoughlessly. i'm sometimes fine with radical manipulation and compression of a film's color palette, so long as it looks good and makes sense. but all too often it doesn't. far too many contemporary films have their entire color schemes squashed into clashing panes of blue and orange for no apparent reason other than that it's trendy to do so. sure, it makes everything look sharp and loud, "dynamic", but it also tends to rob photography & lighting of their nuance. and come on, at a certain point the endless parade of oompa-loompa orange faces starts to seem ridiculous. watching jean pierre jeunet's micmacs earlier tonight, i hit the wall. i couldn't take it any more. i'm sick to death of worlds painted entirely in steely blue gray and burnt orange. hey, maybe with some bright sky blue and bluish green and maybe even a few splashes of (brickish) red here and there for "color."

the contrast-pumped, desaturated, all blue-gray LOTR/saving private ryan thing was bad enough, when everything had to look jagged and dismal, like a particularly threatening gatorade commercial. now that everyone's trying to juice that same lousy formula up with these two particular colors - and always these two particular colors - it's become a joke, and a line has to be drawn.

i hear you contenderizer, some movies definitely take it too far - that screenshot of hot tub time machine is horrible - but its hardly the 'plague' that people are making it out to be, and furthermore people noticing it has led to people complaining about the simple concept of contrasting colors. its mostly used in excess on popcorn movies - flicks where its not really a crime to 'rob photography & lighting of their nuance'

yeah i wish hollywood would go back to the distracting oversaturation of technicolor, or yeah fuck it just bring it back to b&w who needs all these ppl fucking around with color anyway, they are out of their depth when they fuck with ~color theory~

thread basically boils down to 'snobby art school homos think the masses dont deserve colors'

i prefer this to yellow/purple tbh

something to be said for red/green though

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTI5NzcyOTE1M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDEyNDY3Mw@@._V1._SX640_SY450_.jpg

http://www.tescodvdrental.com/tesco/images/products/screenshots/0/1210-4-large.jpg

Does anyone think modern SVU is one of the most pukey examples of this? Teal, orange but kind of desaturated at times too? I guess it's because in films they have the resources to put it to a kind of fairytale effect, whereas on TV it just seems like your colour perception has been reduced.

btw I think this is fine as a kind of fad. Fads themselves are fine, they just shouldn't stay around too long

guys theres nothing wrong w/orange and teal they are just amazing colors deployed by 1990s sports expansion teams

― ice cr?m, Thursday, January 6, 2011 1:01 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

if u were a boy who grew up in america in the 90s, theres no way u didnt own a charlotte hornets starter jacket or other apparel at some point

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3162/3038391539_5cbff2a6e7.jpg

^lol otm

There are actually some TVs that attempt to compensate for the difference between film running at 24fps and video running at 30fps in a way that ruins the "filmness" of the image.

Thanks -- I'm gonna need this whenever I get a nice TV.

lol even I owned some charlotte hornets gear

http://regmedia.co.uk/2010/12/02/philips_32pfl9705.jpg

my ILM-editor friend says this is all the fault of a lone "star colorist" in Santa Monica that all the bigger directors take their shit to. ILM spends all this time color-correcting their stuff to make everything as "realistic" and natural looking as possible and then it gets turned over to this guy in post and everything comes back different, super-saturated, etc.

reminds me of the loudness wars/mastering issue with music where you have a couple mastering houses that get tagged as being industry standard/do the majority of mastering and turn everything to brickwalled hypercompressed awfulness. soon all the smaller places follow suit and voila product is ruined by a terrible aesthetic.

I'm trying to work out whether this is really a problem with films or if it's the equivalent of audiophile bores banging on about compression.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 6 January 2011 13:55 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

If you thought of something besides "Industrial Light & Magic" when you read that acronym, you may indeed be spending too much time on ILX.

^^OTM

(Orange and Teal, Motherfuckers)

yeah i wish hollywood would go back to the distracting oversaturation of technicolor

fine with me!

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 6 January 2011 15:44 (2 hours ago)

totally predictably, me too. Haha oh shit, wait:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3291/2441152631_ca107a93e5.jpg

http://www.bravotv.com/media/images/persons/andy-miami-vice-320x240.jpg
http://famewatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Don_Johnson_Miami_Vice6.jpg

haha

http://content.bandzoogle.com/users/OfficialJanHammer/images/photos/gallery/3030546.jpg?1

Truth said, everybody looks better with a tan.

There are actually some TVs that attempt to compensate for the difference between film running at 24fps and video running at 30fps in a way that ruins the "filmness" of the image. No other info to hand, sorry.

yeah, this. you can turn it off; it's always somewhere in the settings. what's funny is that all the demo TVs at my local fred meyer (pacific-northwest-area chain supermarket/electronics store) have this on, so everything on them looks terrible and distracting, except for CGI fantasy movies, which look "realistic" in a really eerie and disconcerting way, like someone is shooting a wedding video on the nonexistent set of how to train your dragon.

I'm trying to work out whether this is really a problem with films or if it's the equivalent of audiophile bores banging on about compression.

i don't get this binary - it's a rising trend in movies that it's pretty clearly based on digital ease rather than a thought-out "style". Gonna bother some people more than others but it's not like the options are to either wail in agony or dismiss it entirely.

yeah idk plax maybe you're very sensitive to color in a way that i'm not but otoh it kinda comes across as a pretty thin excuse to declare oh my how dreadful big budget movies are these days, can you believe these pop comedies don't even make aesthetic choices with regard to their color palettes

it's not that they "don't make aesthetic choices", it's that a certain deliberately unnatural aesthetic becomes the default — but it's still a "choice" tho and the only way ppl will stop making it (especially if it's become so automatic that they don't even think about or realize why they're doing it) is if audiences complain

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/7f5e6cc75ec0e9b9cae9ad26968340bc.jpg

I don't think audiences complaining about high compression in music is influencing any mastering practices

I think this revolution has to come from within

should be the theme for wdyll feb 11

pink / green 2012

http://www.eurweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/little_fockers2010-med-wide.jpg

Fockers flipping the script.

Truth said, everybody looks better with a tan.

― heh (kelpolaris), Thursday, January 6, 2011 12:40 PM (1 hour ago)

http://evilbeetgossip.film.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/57104056valentino422009121712am.jpg

yeah...

There are two points here, and I see where elmo is possibly right in calling out confirmation bias:

1. There are some films where the actual sets, clothing, etc. betray the director's palette bias (that Wes Anderson film upthread)

2. There are a shitload of films where, if you looked at the color histogram of the image, there'd be a disproportionate clustering in the teal and orange areas of the color spectrum.

I don't have photo analysis shit (lightroom, aperture, photoshop) on hand here, so someone help me out on the second one.

http://a.onionstatic.com/images/articles/article/49052/wfcatsdogs_jpg_627x1000_q85.jpg\

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

http://www.dvd-monthly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/the_dark_knight06.jpg

I thought this thread would be about modern movies in general, but you all found another way to depress me --- congratulations, free pizza after the thread is over etc.

my ILM-editor friend says this is all the fault of a lone "star colorist" in Santa Monica that all the bigger directors take their shit to. ILM spends all this time color-correcting their stuff to make everything as "realistic" and natural looking as possible and then it gets turned over to this guy in post and everything comes back different, super-saturated, etc.

― assorted curses (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, January 6, 2011 6:17 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^
feel like this is imptnt. all it takes is one or two houses/agencies to make this a thing maybe?

in which case bring on the changing of the star colorist guard obv

by the way, i keep hearing "teal & orange" in my head to the tune of wiz khalifa's "black & yellow"

otm

Pashmina, what is that beach image from?

The beach image is from "Good Morning, Eve"! (1934) which is IIRC either the first or second live action 3-color technicolor movie ever. I love films from that era pretty much unconditionally, but I have to admit, "Good Morning Eve" is tough to sit through, it's pretty corny. The 2 women are part of the regular troupe of dancers/chorus girls who appeared in just about every MGM and Warners musical 1930-1935.

Thanks! The color's really vivid for that era.

Actually I'm trying to work out whether this is really a problem with films or if it's the equivalent of audiophile bores banging on about compression.

This is more like Auto-Tune for color.

Wasn't crazy about The American, but am crazy about Anton Corbijn.

http://media.nola.com/entertainment_impact_tvfilm/photo/0903-the-american-george-clooney-3jpg-dfd9e7eae04cbc41_large.jpg

you think this orange and teal thing is bad, my nan watches all these films where everything's just shades of grey.

(oops, meant to post The American in the yay thread, not this nay one.)

http://www.kongregate.com/games/FreakyZoid/tealy-orangey

Speaking of color manipulation, I just watched A Single Man. My god, those saturation swells were so distracting.

if you "notice" the color scheme rather than "appreciate" it the filmmakers are doing it wrong imo

I watched 20 minutes of the new Clash of the Titans this weekend and this was so blatant, I couldn't pay attention to anything else. The skin tones were so awful.

wow this is a mindfuck

http://i612.photobucket.com/albums/tt203/pplains/Picture-8.jpg

you know what was p. bad for this in retrospect (tho it didnt bother me at the time)? six feet under

Related to plasma screens and video, not teal/orange, I watched a few minutes of Avatar on that same fancy TV I wrote about last week, and the thing looked just like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fMxzeov0Fo

it's a wonder cameron didn't make the avatar jungle orange

feel like some people are equating "Teal and Orange," (a kind of specific phenomenon where the color correction is overdone and keyed to these exaggerated tones that, like any other film trend, looked new and awesome and zeitgeist-y at first and has just gotten v. out of hand), with movies that just have lots of blue and orange, which, dude, that shit is a sunrise, it's fine.