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Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness
- njl 17y agoAs 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 17y agoI 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?
- mrcharles 17y agoWell, do you need to make them pop? Really, are we so far gone that we believe viewers can't identify people in a scene without making them 'pop'?
- thefool 17y agoNo, but high contrast images look better...
- njl 17y agoI 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 17y agoin 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.
- conover 17y agoSo, nearly limitless freedom gives everyone the option of looking the same.
- aarongough 17y agoIt'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.
- sp332 17y agoYeah, it's even worse than the Wilhelm Scream: http://revision3.com/filmriot/btsdslr#seek=286 http://revision3.com/filmriot/btsdslr#seek=286 (text description if you can't see the video: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream)
- aarongough 17y agoGreat find! I know that there is one other scream that I hear constantly in movies but I have no idea if it has a name... I'll have to make sure to keep an ear out for it!
- theblackbox 17y agoThere is a really annoying one that used to haunt me when being forced to enjoy watching football (soccer) with my dad: ALL video replays had the exact same audio on it. It really used to grate on me as it was really obvious once you had got used to it, but my dad could never hear it. Just a little anecdotal evidence of my experience on this fascinating subject. Perception, attention and information are very interesting facets of psychology!
- Vindexus 17y agoThanks for that! Do you have any idea what scream this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3WimCPUkQY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3WimCPUkQY It's from the Terran Academy in StarCraft, and I've heard it in other places but don't know the name of it.
- cakesy 17y agoYes, no doubt this guy is an expert in screams, teaches the Screams PHD course at MIT, and has analysed and manipulated every single scream produced by all forms of entertainment over the last 50 years.
- joezydeco 17y agoI 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 17y agoAnd 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"...
- pmjordan 17y agoEep. I had mine set to #00bbdd until 10 seconds ago...
- presidentender 17y agoArgh. #00aaaa here, and I've even seen this rant before. Just didn't think about it.
- ars 17y agoMine's green #66ff00. I copied it from the color of old greenscreen CRTs. I still like that color best for coding, my shell, etc.
- randallsquared 17y agoYeah, I set mine that way as soon as I could, too. I wonder how common that is?
- blasdel 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors Mine is b0a0d0
- nym 17y ago
- Hoff 17y agoAkin 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 17y agoI still see reel-change marks ('cigarette burns') fairly often these days! I guess most of the cinemas you're going have digital projectors?
- __david__ 17y agoWhat 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.
- mds 17y agoHere's an alternate explanation for the phenomenon (linked to from the blog post): http://prolost.com/blog/2010/2/15/memory-colors.html 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.)
- oneplusone 17y agoAmazing post. This deserves its own thread.
- Timothee 17y agoThat post links to this one: http://www.squarefree.com/2004/03/05/color-constancy-illusion/ http://www.squarefree.com/2004/03/05/color-constancy-illusio... 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 http://screenjel.ly/oHDkBcDFnoQ (video, no sound)
- russell 17y agoI found the head color correction interesting. I would say he used and overall filter rather than doing a spot correction on the head. The head becomes lighter, but it's still gray, not a Caucasian color. The sky has gone from blue to a mog induced green The most interesting are the copper pipes which have gone from copper (a memory color in my book) to a bright red. I have watched mv GF produced stunning paintings from a limited palate of 4 to 6 colors for a painting. Once she has a sketch of a painting her next major step is designing a palate for it, including the grounds, which get completely covered up to the layers that build up the image. It's really an elaborate illusion. Is violet a skin tone? Yes, when it's a shadow that complements orange red of the skin highlights.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- enneff 17y agoIt 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.
- MartinCron 17y agoHe'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.
- tkiley 17y agoThis 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)
- mikecane 17y agoI'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).
- __david__ 17y agoYeah I definitely noticed color and CSI. What's interesting to me is that they gave each spin-off their own color identity. The original had kind of a greenish tinge, CSI: Miami has more of a yellow/orange tint and CSI: NY has a blueish color. I think it used to be more pronounced--I don't notice it as much any more. Though perhaps I just got used to it.
- philwelch 17y agoThe Matrix did the same thing--all the scenes that took place in the matrix were tinted green.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Mz 17y agoI 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 17y agoOf course, I long ago personalised my top colour away from Orange. Alas, I changed it to Teal.
- anigbrowl 17y agoStrangely enough, my topcolor is a powdery blue, at almost the opposite spot on the color wheel. I just set it to 'abcdef' when I created my HN account. COINCIDENCE??!?!?!
- froo 17y agoI'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_psychology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism 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.
- VladimirGolovin 17y agoThey 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 http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Superstimulus
- pvg 17y agoComplementary. Complimentary is something else altogether.
- CulturalNgineer 17y agoEND THE MADNESS! Bring back Black and White...
- bravura 17y agoI 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.
- comron 17y agoI saw this post a few days ago, and then today noticed the trailer for Repo Men is almost EXCLUSIVELY teal and orange.