

Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness - mikecane
http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html

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mds
Here's an alternate explanation for the phenomenon (linked to from the blog
post): <http://prolost.com/blog/2010/2/15/memory-colors.html>

The origin of the idea is to preserve skin tones and other "memory colors"
(stop signs, taxi cabs), regardless of how the rest of the scene is rendered
(bright or drab).

So it's not that film colorists are intentionally making everything teal and
orange (or actually maybe the lazy ones are now that's it's become something
of a cliche.)

~~~
Timothee
That post links to this one: [http://www.squarefree.com/2004/03/05/color-
constancy-illusio...](http://www.squarefree.com/2004/03/05/color-constancy-
illusion/)

I knew the gray-tone checkerboard but this is a very surprising illusion. I
opened the image in Photoshop and had a hard time believing the effect:
<http://screenjel.ly/oHDkBcDFnoQ> (video, no sound)

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aarongough
It's interesting that the vast majority of us would have seen all those films
and never noticed... I get the feeling that now every time I watch a recent
movie I'm going to be thinking of this post.

~~~
potatolicious
As a photographer, this post is way full of crap - look at famous photographs,
and you will see the _exact_ same thing even _before_ the days of Photoshop.

These colors are used because they _work_ , and they project a certain effect
on your images. Blaming this on the advent of computers is disingenuous -
photographers have been shooting at Golden Hour for generations to capture the
contrasty orangeness since God knows when.

~~~
cool-RR
He said that computers have caused this _in movies_ , because now every frame
can be manipulated separately.

~~~
potatolicious
Right, but I fail to see how a valid artistic theme in photography suddenly
becomes lazy me-too-ism when applied to film.

Art goes through phases - maybe there was _that guy_ back during the
Renaissance complaining about how all the sculptures looked the same, etc etc.
This is simply the way art goes.

~~~
gabrielroth
Sometimes technology makes it easier to do something, and then people do that
thing more than they did before, to the point where they're doing it too much.

It's like AutoTune in music: people have always tried to sing in tune, but now
they can sing _even more_ in tune, and so current pop music has almost lost
the naturalism and emotional effects produced by subtle variance in pitch.

~~~
potatolicious
Isn't that simply a matter of aesthetics though? I don't much like autotune
either, but I'm willing to admit the possibility that it's simply because I
grew up listening to a different aesthetic.

We've certainly lost a lot of aesthetics as art styles changed over time -
when's the last time you saw a good tapestry? I don't see this as particularly
bad, though, it's simply "the way it is" in art. Periodically we will exchange
one thing for another, and life goes on.

~~~
aero142
No, it's not an opinion, autotune is evil :)

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Hoff
Akin to color compression, various recent popular music is clipped into a
fairly narrow range of frequencies, and with Auto-Tune filters applied to the
voices.

Listening to music with a (larger) dynamic range and with little or no Auto-
Tune can make the differences apparent; you start noticing similarities to the
flanging effect used with the voices of the Goa'uld in Stargate series.

Like reel-change marks in the old days, once you notice this sort of stuff,
you're doomed.

~~~
aarongough
I still see reel-change marks ('cigarette burns') fairly often these days! I
guess most of the cinemas you're going have digital projectors?

~~~
__david__
What really will get to you is that quite often during the reel change they'll
stop the audio. Rarely does the music or sound remain continuous through the
change. Quite often the new reel starts with dead silence. And just like the
marks, once you notice this you'll never stop noticing it again.

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bravura
I believe this trend started with "The Fifth Element", one of the first movies
to use a lot of orange. That film was visually striking at the time, because
Orange was such an eye-catching color. It was also avant-garde, because Orange
was considered very tacky mid-ninties.

The Fifth Element came out several years before the millenium. If you'll
recall, Orange was hailed by the fashion world as the color of the millenium.

Fifth Element was styled by Jean Paul Gaultier, who is one of the few avant-
garde designers to reach the highest echelon of respect in the fashion world.
It is because of his rare ability to combine costume and high fashion.

Disappointingly, the visual effect of The Fifth Element is now lost. Much of
its shocking visual palette is now standard. Such is fashion.

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conover
So, nearly limitless freedom gives everyone the option of looking the same.

~~~
sp332
"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
<http://despair.com/connot.html>

~~~
mapleoin
I like your quote, but why does it end with a link to the '90s?

~~~
sp332
Just the first thing that came to mind.

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MartinCron
He's complaining about hacky techniques in a Michael Bay movie? Outlandish!
When have you ever been able to look at Hollywood blockbusters as serious art?

This whole thing smells like confirmation bias. There are plenty of movies
being made with broader/different color palettes. If you chose to watch
Transformers 2, that's nobody's fault but your own.

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tkiley
This is the visual equivalent of destructively loud mastering on popular
music. It's interesting to see that the same tradeoff applies to both formats:
postproduction techniques add generic excitement and "pop" to an entertainment
experience, at the cost of making everything look (and sound) alike, which
reduces the dynamic range of the experience.

(Edit: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war>)

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njl
As part of trying to become better (through necessity) at web design, I've
been discovering the best way to learn about design is to find pet-peeve rants
by good designers.

This one is going to give me something to chew on.

~~~
Periodic
I don't like pet-peeve rants because they rarely tell you how to find
something original that works. They're very quick to tell you what doesn't
work, and perhaps a little bit of why, but they don't really give much insight
into how to find good alternatives.

For example, if you have a lot of faces in your film, how do you make them
"pop" and stand out without using lots of teal?

~~~
njl
I should have been more clear. The rants are interesting because they
highlight things that have been subtly bugging me, but I don't know why.

In this case, I scroll through and look at all of those pictures, and I know
something is wrong. It takes someone with talent and experience to talk about
the color balance. That gives me something concrete I can look for when I try
to put together designs -- don't just go and get yourself complementary colors
and then just go nuts with the contrast.

~~~
nsfmc
in honesty, as a designer, you should refine _your own_ taste. Know what you
like, what you don't. Be unashamed of this: it's what separates your work from
others'. Once you do, you'll have 'the angry years' where you go off and rail
against this or that to everyone you know (blah blah lucida blah blah poor
attempt at contrast harmony blah blah composition not dynamic blah blah).

But all the while, this is developing your internal taste barometer, things
you love and things you won't stand for. This will influence your work in
every way possible, from things like stroke width (looks too constructivist!)
to decisions about texture (halftone again?!, what is this, the 50s?)

I'll agree that it's good to keep up with what other people bitch about (gotta
keep up with the zeitgeist!) but it's often funnier than informational, and
more often, their posts lack substance or rally around some shallow point that
you no longer care about. I mean, yes, i've seen the golden rectangle, i
studied maths, but _i_ don't buy the whole "look! look! the golden ratio is
EVERYWHERE!" argument that is basically what this webpage boiled down to. But
that's my own taste talking.

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VladimirGolovin
They won't stop. Warm-cool color combos (orange/yellow vs blue, teal vs
orange, cyan vs red, steel vs red etc.) provide the most color contrast, so
the picture always looks "bright" and "vivid" to a casual viewer.

BTW, the trick is far from new. Some examples that come to mind are Aliens and
Terminator 2 (blue/gray vs red/orange, done via lighting) and Empire Strikes
Back (again, blues vs reds/oranges -- very well nuanced across the entire
movie except the Yoda swamp scenes).

See also: "Superstimulus": <http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Superstimulus>

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froo
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Colour Psychology or Colour Symbolism yet
and how these two colours are used to illicit a desired emotional response
from the viewers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism>

I would suggest that these colours are used rather deliberately for that very
reason.

I've reposted some meanings of the two colours below for reference.

 _Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is
associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm,
fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success,
encouragement, and stimulation._

 _Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and
stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence,
faith, truth, and heaven._

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mikecane
I'm gratified many of you liked this submission.

You can see this effect a lot on TV too. I think CSI began with a conscious
act of manipulating the color palette via computer. Contrast that sort of
color bias to rendering true colors via photography in a series such as Miami
Vice (made well before there was this possibility).

~~~
philwelch
The Matrix did the same thing--all the scenes that took place in the matrix
were tinted green.

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enneff
It is true, colour grading has gone crazy in today's movies. I find it so
amazingly distracting. Fortunately there are still some tastefully graded
films being made. Even Avatar was pretty nicely coloured.

Like all fashions, this will change with time.

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pvg
Complementary. Complimentary is something else altogether.

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CulturalNgineer
END THE MADNESS!

Bring back Black and White...

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joezydeco
I dunno, the CSS color scheme of this site is definitely orange (and almost
teal in the background, at least on my monitor). I think this is a bigger
conspiracy than we imagined.

~~~
derefr
And when I got the ability to color the top nav at some N karma, I
unthinkingly set it to teal (or cyan, in my words.) Now that I think about or,
it really does make the Y "pop"...

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pmjordan
Eep. I had mine set to #00bbdd until 10 seconds ago...

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presidentender
Argh. #00aaaa here, and I've even seen this rant before. Just didn't think
about it.

~~~
ars
Mine's green #66ff00. I copied it from the color of old greenscreen CRTs.

I still like that color best for coding, my shell, etc.

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comron
I saw this post a few days ago, and then today noticed the trailer for Repo
Men is almost EXCLUSIVELY teal and orange.

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Mz
I find it ironic that this is posted here on HN, where the top color is
orange. (Of course, I like teal and orange and once had a wardrobe with a lot
of those two colors in it.)

~~~
JacobAldridge
Of course, I long ago personalised my top colour away from Orange. Alas, I
changed it to Teal.

