

Distribution of colors in movie posters between 1914 and 2012 - fallenhitokiri
http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/new_page.html

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alister
I am awe-struck with what people with a passion manage to get done "in a
couple weeks" just for fun.

I can't imagine that I could have _hired_ someone to do the same analysis,
research, programming, scripting, graphics creation, and web site layout for
anything less than tens of thousands of dollars. (Or is my intuition wrong
about that?)

~~~
styts
Nowhere does he say that he spent all of the 2 weeks working on this entirely.
My guess would be that he did a 2-day sprint to hack the prototype and a bit
more to polish it across the 2 weeks. Point is - he would not bill 2 working
weeks were it a contracting gig. But then again, where'd you get such a
motivated contractor (cf. working on own project)?

~~~
alister
If he did it in a 2-day sprint, that makes it even more amazing -- which was
my point. It seems unlikely to me that I could find someone to do the same
quality of work as a contracting gig (whether it took 2 days or 2 months) and
charge less than tens of thousands of dollars.

~~~
aw3c2
That's why people spouting "open-source is always less quality" and "without
paying artists there would be no culture" are so dead wrong. People who feel
the urge to create and do, will do so. And to me, things that were created for
one's own enjoyment are pretty much always better than things created to be
monetised.

~~~
briandear
Right. Can you imagine a film with the quality of Toy Story being produced
just for fun? Not a chance. ThAt film took thousands of man-years to make. The
whole open source everything movement is just communist nonsense that
typically comes from people who have never had to make a payroll. Rails for
example was the open source result of a profit-creating piece of software:
Basecamp. The profits enabled the open source not the other way around. When I
can feed my family, I'll contribute to open source, but who pays open source
developers? Usually they're being subsidized by closed source work. For
example, in my current day job, I'm building software for a startup. That pays
the bills so I can afford to dabble in open source for fun. The idea if give
everything away is just silly. Who is going to pay for the computer you're
usin to develop on? Who pays the electric bills? Certainly not te little open
source fairy godmother.

~~~
dill_day
Many great films are made on a fraction of the budget required to produce
something like Toy Story. And anyway I don't think it's hard to imagine Pixar
artists saying they were more motivated by the pure joy of creating something
than by their paychecks. There are bad movies that are created specifically to
be monetized -- that people need money is beside the point that often those
who create the really good stuff are probably doing it more for fun than for
money. I think I see what you're saying, but it seems like an overreaction to
what didn't strike me as a controversial comment by the parent.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
If that were true, there would be other movies like Toy Story, but "open".

~~~
nja
Well, it isn't quite as long, but <http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/> was pretty
good in terms of quality.

~~~
matt_e
That project had a budget of about EUR150k and artists were paid.

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ZacharyPitts
I immediately starting scanning the colors to see if this blog post from a
couple of years ago was vindicated about all movies being teal and orange:

[http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-
ho...](http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-
please-stop.html)

It is.

~~~
scott_s
I don't think "vindicated" is quite the word - as far as I know, the author
hasn't taken any significant flak for it, nor have I heard much about it
beyond "Huh, yeah, they do look like that now." I would just go with "this
analysis is in agreement with this other one."

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ColinWright
In the associated blog post he says:

    
    
      Methodology:
      I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images
      (yay wget -- “The Social Network” inspired
      me to not use curl)
    

Could some who's seen the film enlighten me on why wget is better than curl?

Thanks.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
HTTPie[1] is better than both. ;)

1\. <https://github.com/jkbr/httpie>

(I am in no way affiliated with this project. I'm just a happy user.)

~~~
harbud
Ok, httpie is prettier and has some syntax shortcuts, but it doesn't even do a
fraction of what curl or wget does. No recursive downloads, no simulating
diferent HTTP protocol version, no SSL options, no even retry options! #fail

(I am in no way an httpie hater.)

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aw3c2
While beautiful, only a seriously limited amount of movies was analysed for
this and the selection seems weird. The year 2000 for example only has 48
movies in this. I am not sure you can interpret anything from it.

~~~
larrys
Agree.

I'm surprised at the amount of comments here that reflect this data as if it's
gospel and whether it's fair to interpret anything from it at all. We can't
even vet and recreate the methodology of, as you said "limited movies", and
see if it's correct for what it does say.

Not to mention the fact that prior to 1929 there is not more than 9 posters of
data being analyzed.

Printing has changed also. Number of color, type of press, computerization all
would contribute to difference in what designers would do (the analysis did
mention this) but as mentioned the data was limited.

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fallenhitokiri
I'd be interested seeing someone (not fit enough in this topics to do it
myself) applying color psychology and mapping it to the years / events /
industry.

Could explain the shift from warmer colors to more technical ones (just
speculating)

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
Looks like "Peak Oil" back in 1977 made people feel blue or resulted in
different chemicals being used in films. The blue band is much wider for that
year all of a sudden.

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yesbabyyes
Or it was Star Wars. ;-)

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Plausible; as it happens again in 1980 (Empire Strikes Back)

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hammerbrostime
Interesting to watch the color gamut open up as color printing technologies
improve over time. Blue/Cyan is the hardest pigment to work with, and you can
see the blue-range grow over time as the technology to support it improves.

~~~
patrickk
I would say the color gamut has narrowed recently.

 _Really_ good blog post on Hollywood going mad with teal and orange:
[http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.ie/2010/03/teal-and-orange-
hol...](http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.ie/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-
please-stop.html)

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bane
The eventual settling on teal and orange is interesting. I'm curious what the
feedback loop was that told the marketing department "this is what will make
more money". It seems such a subtle thing, and I would think red (as an
alarming color) or green (as the color we see best) would end up figuring more
prominently.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I'm sure you've seen this[1] before, but the answer is probably more of a
feedback loop. The big-money movies could afford to do more color alterations
that caused movies to appear to "pop", getting audiences used to those colors,
forcing less-expensive movies to do the same as the technology to do so became
cheaper.

1\. [http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-
ho...](http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-
please-stop.html)

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jdavid
It would be interesting to combine this information with boxofficemojo and
adjust the distribution of colors based on box office revenue assuming that
box office revenue correlates to mindshare, you would have a closer map to
what people 'thought' a movie poster would look like in that year.

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ekianjo
More red/yellow before, more blue/violet in recent history. Cool data set, but
the question is "so what?".

~~~
gradstudent
Well, it's interesting to see that Teal and Orange filters are used just as
prominently in promotional material as in the films themselves. It's a
terrible trend and annoying as hell. See here for more:

[http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/teal-and-
orange...](http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/teal-and-orange-
hollywood-please-stop.html)

~~~
shimfish
I was looking out for the Teal/Orange effect and was interested to see that it
started in posters way back in the 80s already, 20 years before digital film
color grading.

~~~
_delirium
That's an interesting observation. I wonder if that's a more general kind of
lag that can be found with other effects, with things becoming feasible in
still design work some years before the analogous thing becomes feasible in
film/video.

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NanoWar
I wonder what happened in 1921. It was out of control!

~~~
MengYuanLong
The most interesting part of 1921 is that the original(?) Brewster's Millions
was released. In the original movie, the protagonist had to spend $2mil in a
year and remain unmarried to inherit the full $10mil. By 1985, the remake
dropped the marriage requirement (honestly, being a single rich guy in the
1980s wasn't too bad) and upped the spending requirement to $30 mil in 30 days
to inherit $300 mil.

My, how times change. I wonder what Montgomery Brewster will have to do in
2049 to earn his inheritance.

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gulbrandr
Related: <http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/>

Shows an entire movie in a single image.

~~~
vijayr
Can anyone explain how this works?

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FelipeCortez
I don't know for sure, but judging from the sequence shots, looks like it
scans a pixel column depending corresponding to the part of the movie. If it's
scanning a frame halfway of the movie, it will scan the pixel column in the
middle of the frame.

~~~
lurker14
Basically, it's the equivalent of putting a monitor face down on a flatbed
scanner, and scanning while the movie plays.

Or taking a photo of the screen with a very slow CMOS (camera phone) sensor.

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fritzvd
Wasn't this here before? It's still cool though :)

~~~
carpo
I thought that too, but then after reading it I remembered a previous post
about the distribution of colours within actual movies, not movie posters. So
perhaps that is what you remember too?

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yread
Interesting that there are no black columns ie no colors which consistently
wouldn't be used. Green is represented very little though

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vernon
Fascinating viewing. Wonder what changed us from being all sunshine and light
to being all doom and gloom. I blame the Dark Knight.

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ricardobeat
Ha, you can see the teal trend getting stronger in the 2000s. I wonder why the
colorfulness of 1919-1921 was so quickly reverted?

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JacobIrwin
I'm curious about the distribution of ink costs (by color) during the same
timespan - just how close that correlation is.

~~~
shiftb
This is the question I was going to ask. I've heard that the reason most
superheroe's costumes are primary colors is because it was less expensive to
print them for the comics. I wonder if a similar effect is happening here?

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Erifcit
If they were scanned in recently, doesn't this just prove that print materials
do indeed yellow over time?

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mbq
But why a stacked barplot? This way you can easily see the dynamics in reds
but the apparent amount of blue is quite deceiving. IMO a better idea is fixed
hue grid and modulated saturation for the counts.

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kator
Looks like Star Wars posters messed up 1977!?

<http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977>

~~~
kator
Hmm again in 1980:

<http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1980>

Maybe Lucas really was a visionary!

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Aloha
I wonder how much this adjusts for natural fading in prints.

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jeffool
I find the near constant use of red interesting. Given all we've been told of
red and marketing (think cereal boxes), I figured it would grown.

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squarecat
OK, so who's going to do the correlation with en vogue colors from the same
years (fashion, paint, cars, etc.)?

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haddr
but hey, isn't there any color corruption during scanning/digitalisation of
those posters?

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five_star
Cool! Color combinations form sinusoid throughout the history.

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presidentender
What happened in 1977?

~~~
danbee
Star Wars?

~~~
Ogre
And Close Encounters, and Saturday Night Fever, which both have blue-ish
posters here: <http://www.imdb.com/list/_EcfN1DMzJQ/>

Also The Deep, which isn't on that list but did pretty well so likely had a
lot of posters. All of which would be mostly ocean.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075925/>

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squarecat
Wait, so they all fall on the visible spectrum?

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splicer
I don't see The Matrix. I wonder if it was left out because it's on outlier
(too green/yellow).

