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Movie Color Analysis - Part 1 (smartjava.org)
29 points by josdirksen on March 1, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



Is there supposed to be a purpose to this? Personally, I don't think (accurate) Colour Analysis can be accomplished simply by taking the mean shades of every other horizontal line on the screen. A massive component of how cinematographers and art directors use colour to illustrate a story or reinforce the strength of a moment is through the alteration of colour. For instance, there are specific scenes in Up wherein a shift of mood is often conveyed through the adjustment of saturation.

Here's where this effect is most prevalent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgVsVmusPg

Pay attention to the colour alteration present in Carl's face and the furnished surroundings after he reads Ellie's 'Stuff I'm Going to Do' scrapbook. It's subtle, but it means a whole lot of difference to viewers and filmmakers alike (the former on a relatively subconscious basis, of course).

Your methodology completely eliminates that variable, so I don't really know what you're expecting to get out of this.


A very interesting article about the overuse of the orange and teal coloring seen in the first example: https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-h...


Bolt [1] is an interesting choice as a major plot point is the shift between the real world and the movie within a movie story of the main character.

Within the film they use color-grading as the main means of indicating the switch and you can easily pick out individual scenes from the display.

1 - http://movies.disney.com/movies/bolt-4ba34c22e00d459e961b966...


  >In the last couple of months I saw a couple visualizations
Author is probably referring to this: http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ or similar

Examples:

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3432026155/2001-a-space-...

BLADE RUNNER (1982) http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/4438993828/blade-runner-...

STAR WARS: COMPLETE SAGA (1977-2005) http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/13347201975/star-wars-co...

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3512965847/the-wizard-of...

HARRY POTTER: COMPLETE SERIES (2001-2011) http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/12390371286/harry-potter...


I did something similar about a year ago in python using pyffmpeg and PIL.. https://github.com/ksho/film-fingerprints

Code is pretty crumby, but it does the job.




See also Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux project, I have one of these hanging on my wall:

http://brendandawes.com/projects/cinemaredux/


no way is that average colour (what does that even mean?). it's something like the modal colour with saturation shifted to full.


I don't even know what these moves are. Nice visualization though - could you do a maybe more diverse selection of titles?


So what were your thoughts when comparing the films? Will part 2 have a discussion?


Shazam for video?




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