6 ms·

Just another fad. Visual artists are very fashion driven. As technology creates new possibilities, they get abused. In the 80/90s music videos had fade/dissol

by 323 5y ago

Just another fad. Visual artists are very fashion driven. As technology creates new possibilities, they get abused. In the 80/90s music videos had fade/dissolve effects. Then in early 2000s a lot of them played with the aspect ratio "black bands" (like when you play 4:3 on 16:10), making them white, pink, or textured, with border lines and other effects. In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion "water/colored dust hitting something" scene. Since 2015, color grading is the new fad. Also unnatural weird (LED) lighting, like the left half of the frame in strong red light and the right half in strong blue light. Color grading is also infecting instagram. For example in city photography, there is quite a trend of grading them orange/teal. There is also a lot of social pressure to color grade. If you don't, fellow artists will say something like "look at that peasant, he didn't grade his stuff, what a noob, putting out real colors, he probably doesn't even know what a LUT is". And then you have the honest noob who tries to improve his skill, and he sees all the pros doing it, so he concludes that he should too, since all the pros can't be wrong, even if to his eyes the strongly color graded video kind of looks like shit, but he's just probably wrong and just needs to educate his aesthetics. There will come a point when color grading will fell out of fashion, just like you rarely see a fade/dissolve or slow-motion effect today, and when they are used it's because they make sense, not because you must do it no matter what.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Sounds very much like what happens in other industries (such as software development). "Look at that peasant, he didn't use Rust, ..."
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Rounded corners! Radius on buttons (“Pills”) started its journey in 2018 and it spread like a plague.
  - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
    Pill-shaped buttons were part of the Aqua theme in the original release of OS X. For a long time after that, UIs aped Aqua with pinstripes and jelly-shaded pills and while the pinstripes and jelly have gone, I think the pills are here to stay for some styles.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      Yeah but there was a huge push just last year, basically every single SaaS app to Firefox, everyone folded. During the Aqua days, every company had their own unique take on design. Today, it is a design monoculture driven by the types of Stripe and Apple. Design used to be a differentiating feature. Everything looks the same today. Kind of a Big Tech dystopia, even in design.
      - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
        My point was, a lot of UI followed or was heavily inspired by whatever Apple was doing even then. These days, there's more Google in the mix. Before pill buttons, they were gray beveled rounded rectangles, be it native or web, on every platform. I don't view now as being especially dominated by sameness versus the past.
      - dvtrn 5y ago
        As the owner of an ultrawide...so much whitespace.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      It was already there 10 years earlier in OpenLook.
    - Angostura 5y ago
      Aqua - the "lickable" theme. I miss it, I prefer it to the current washed out MacOS where I cant tell what is what.
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    Not every change is based on stylistic fads alone. Rounded corners on elements can increase the ability of users to recognize them and separate them from other elements, because visually the borders are less likely to be confused with other UI elements (lower cognitive load). This article quotes a researcher on this topic: > A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our ‘fovea-eye’ is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.¹ 1: https://designmodo.com/rounded-corners/ https://designmodo.com/rounded-corners/
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      Mark my words - there is going to be a reverse trend, say 5-10 years from now. Same with color gradients, it will become uncool. It's all fashion. > sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort I have my doubts about this. It is 100% fad IMO.
      - 323 5y ago
        Like how Windows slowly removed colors from it's icons, until they almost became black and white, only to reintroduce color back in Windows 11. And how Windows 11 lists rounded windows and corners as a "signature feature"! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signature-experiences/geometry https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu...
        4cao 5y ago
        And they still managed to get the round corners wrong, apparently. According to that page, the radius values are hardcoded in pixels, so they don't scale with the display's DPI setting. That's at least a decade after the W3C had a well-developed concept of relative units for use with the CSS: https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.html#future https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.html#future (2010) Thus, with a sufficiently high DPI display, you're going to miss out on one of Windows 11's "signature experiences" and end up with "legacy" squarish corners instead.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Don’t forget gradients for everything. Going even further back, the tacky wild fractal wallpaper backgrounds on websites with animated gif “under construction” banners on top. Give it 5 years and iOS and android will get some visual refresh that makes the current stuff look very dated. Fashion is constantly changing and being revisited. It’s just the way it is. Something about it is what makes humans what they are. We love it…
  - akersten 5y ago
    I just updated to Android 12 and the new border-radius on nearly every UI element is beyond absurd. It actually looks like someone just discovered that CSS property, and instead of being told by a designer "that looks goofy and childlike, tone it down," they doubled the value and put it on even more elements. My notifications pull-down fits about 3 useful notifications. The rest is whitespace and rounded corners 4 layers deep. It's horrible.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    Corporate Memphis!
Cloudef 5y ago
Happens to games too, i often spend good time modifying the game to get rid of the screen filter effects that ruin the whole render.
lloeki 5y ago
> there is quite a trend of grading them orange/teal I could swear I read in essence the same article about movies being all orange/teal a couple or three years ago. EDIT: oh, that was 2013 actually. Ironically O'Brother gets the blame for that too. https://shootandcut.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop-the-madness/ https://shootandcut.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/teal-and-orange...
- lupire 5y ago
  tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContrast
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    How very kind of you to format that un-clicky (not sarcasm)
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      Making you think twice before opening tv tropes is probably for the better. Do you really want to go down that path right now?
      - spookthesunset 5y ago
        Oh man is that site a rabbit hole.
        benrow 5y ago
        Reminds me of Every Frame a Painting on YouTube - another fascinating place where hours can fly by.
        baud147258 5y ago
        though it's quicker to go through the whole Every Frame a Painting series on YT that dig back up to the surface from a good old tvtrope rabbit hole.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Reminds me of the lens flares of the mid 90s and ring explosions of the late 90s. Think Babylon 5 and the Star Wars reissue.
b1c837696ba28b 5y ago
Gated reverb on snare drum. Looking at you, Hugh Padgham.
skeeter2020 5y ago
And all this time we've had star wipe. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, why are we eating hamburger when we can have steak?
hungryhobo 5y ago
probably not another fad, it jus stems from color theory, which have been incorporated in film one way or another for a really long time. Even before these digital color grading took place, scenes in movies are carefully planned out, from set to costumes to lighting, so they fit within a certain range in the color space such it's pleasant for viewers. The orange and teal look is just a very widely used combination that utilizes complementary colors. Even though it's been used a lot i personally still find it quite appealing.
dragontamer 5y ago
> In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion "water/colored dust hitting something" scene. Probably more late-00s than 2010s, but IIRC, the optical-flow slowdown effect was created (and cheaply) distributed. Older slow-mo effects required high FPS cameras. But with 00s technology, you could optical-flow time warp to any slowdown you desired, with mostly good looking results. 300 (released in 2006) was the first popular film that did this, but IIRC the effect was being used in a lot of action films all over the place. Slow-motion was definitely the "Oh wow, that looks cool, and it costs so cheap. Lets do it" effect of the 00s.
- basch 5y ago
  >300 (released in 2006) was the first popular film that did this Does Spider-Man count in 2002? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7Eou4bV-Q&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7Eou4bV-Q&t=56s
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    That's definitely not the optical-flow slowdown trick I'm talking about. That spiderman slow-motion was some combination of 3d effects and maybe real-life cameras ("Matrix" style: https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/15/vfx-artifacts-the-bullet-time-rig-from-the-matrix/ https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/15/vfx-artifacts-the-bu...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc This scene from 300 is very clearly just a wide-angle shot (initially), with someone playing with the Optical Flow timewarp effect (sliding it up and down). Its incredibly cheap. See this demo in Premier Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOc_LkZaIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOc_LkZaIk ---------- That's the thing. 300's main innovation was using _cheap_ effects. Optical flow time-warp didn't appear on Premier for another few years, but the algorithm was popular and was just a custom filter / program that was getting passed around at that time.
    - basch 5y ago
      Upon rewatch, im not even convinced its bullet time and not just a bunch of people standing very still. Which worked for the most part in Anna Karenina and that one video of kids playing basketball. Your point makes sense though, the commonization of frame interpolation is a landmark moment.
kazinator 5y ago
> In the 80/90s music videos had fade/dissolve effects. See "Be in my Video" song by Frank Zappa, Them or Us album [1984].
cmckn 5y ago
> Since 2015, color grading is the new fad. Also unnatural weird (LED) lighting, like the left half of the frame in strong red light and the right half in strong blue light. I recently learned this specific combo is called “bisexual lighting”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_lighting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_lighting
cjohnson318 5y ago
I don't think this is a fad. Artists have been purposefully using limited palettes or limited gamuts for a long time. Often, painting the color that you actually see ends up looking garish, amateurish, or at best, out of place. The film industry is just doing what traditional representative Western Art has been doing for hundreds of years; even after artists had access to cheap, vibrant colors.
woolion 5y ago
It's also way easier to have "good colors" (in a color theoretical sense) this way, and achieve a coherent and consistent look throughout the movie. It's thus one of the best ways to keep budget down, as it will hide a lot of issues you'd have while filming, while generally requiring less work. I believe it to be an important factor since full 3D movies have excellent color comps --see for instance Nathan Fowkes' works. (as an side, in the opposite direction, I remember Kung-fu Panda having pretty good colours, yet I found it a bit tiring to watch.)
SavantIdiot 5y ago
"Requiem for a Dream" is a peak fad, notorious for using "MTV Editing": it has over 1500 cuts. Completely unheard of.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Yup. Eventually someone's gonna re-discover that color is a few more bits to flip to aid in your story telling and the fad's gonna go in the trash.

by 323 5y ago

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

Sounds very much like what happens in other industries (such as software development). "Look at that peasant, he didn't use Rust, ..."

systemvoltage 5y ago
Rounded corners! Radius on buttons (“Pills”) started its journey in 2018 and it spread like a plague.
- NoSorryCannot 5y ago
  Pill-shaped buttons were part of the Aqua theme in the original release of OS X. For a long time after that, UIs aped Aqua with pinstripes and jelly-shaded pills and while the pinstripes and jelly have gone, I think the pills are here to stay for some styles.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Yeah but there was a huge push just last year, basically every single SaaS app to Firefox, everyone folded. During the Aqua days, every company had their own unique take on design. Today, it is a design monoculture driven by the types of Stripe and Apple. Design used to be a differentiating feature. Everything looks the same today. Kind of a Big Tech dystopia, even in design.
    - NoSorryCannot 5y ago
      My point was, a lot of UI followed or was heavily inspired by whatever Apple was doing even then. These days, there's more Google in the mix. Before pill buttons, they were gray beveled rounded rectangles, be it native or web, on every platform. I don't view now as being especially dominated by sameness versus the past.
    - dvtrn 5y ago
      As the owner of an ultrawide...so much whitespace.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    It was already there 10 years earlier in OpenLook.
  - Angostura 5y ago
    Aqua - the "lickable" theme. I miss it, I prefer it to the current washed out MacOS where I cant tell what is what.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Not every change is based on stylistic fads alone. Rounded corners on elements can increase the ability of users to recognize them and separate them from other elements, because visually the borders are less likely to be confused with other UI elements (lower cognitive load). This article quotes a researcher on this topic: > A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our ‘fovea-eye’ is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.¹ 1: https://designmodo.com/rounded-corners/ https://designmodo.com/rounded-corners/
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Mark my words - there is going to be a reverse trend, say 5-10 years from now. Same with color gradients, it will become uncool. It's all fashion. > sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort I have my doubts about this. It is 100% fad IMO.
    - 323 5y ago
      Like how Windows slowly removed colors from it's icons, until they almost became black and white, only to reintroduce color back in Windows 11. And how Windows 11 lists rounded windows and corners as a "signature feature"! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signature-experiences/geometry https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu...
      - 4cao 5y ago
        And they still managed to get the round corners wrong, apparently. According to that page, the radius values are hardcoded in pixels, so they don't scale with the display's DPI setting. That's at least a decade after the W3C had a well-developed concept of relative units for use with the CSS: https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.html#future https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.html#future (2010) Thus, with a sufficiently high DPI display, you're going to miss out on one of Windows 11's "signature experiences" and end up with "legacy" squarish corners instead.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Don’t forget gradients for everything. Going even further back, the tacky wild fractal wallpaper backgrounds on websites with animated gif “under construction” banners on top. Give it 5 years and iOS and android will get some visual refresh that makes the current stuff look very dated. Fashion is constantly changing and being revisited. It’s just the way it is. Something about it is what makes humans what they are. We love it…
- akersten 5y ago
  I just updated to Android 12 and the new border-radius on nearly every UI element is beyond absurd. It actually looks like someone just discovered that CSS property, and instead of being told by a designer "that looks goofy and childlike, tone it down," they doubled the value and put it on even more elements. My notifications pull-down fits about 3 useful notifications. The rest is whitespace and rounded corners 4 layers deep. It's horrible.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Corporate Memphis!

Cloudef 5y ago

Happens to games too, i often spend good time modifying the game to get rid of the screen filter effects that ruin the whole render.

lloeki 5y ago

> there is quite a trend of grading them orange/teal I could swear I read in essence the same article about movies being all orange/teal a couple or three years ago. EDIT: oh, that was 2013 actually. Ironically O'Brother gets the blame for that too. https://shootandcut.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop-the-madness/ https://shootandcut.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/teal-and-orange...

lupire 5y ago
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContrast
- h2odragon 5y ago
  How very kind of you to format that un-clicky (not sarcasm)
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Making you think twice before opening tv tropes is probably for the better. Do you really want to go down that path right now?
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      Oh man is that site a rabbit hole.
      - benrow 5y ago
        Reminds me of Every Frame a Painting on YouTube - another fascinating place where hours can fly by.
        baud147258 5y ago
        though it's quicker to go through the whole Every Frame a Painting series on YT that dig back up to the surface from a good old tvtrope rabbit hole.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Reminds me of the lens flares of the mid 90s and ring explosions of the late 90s. Think Babylon 5 and the Star Wars reissue.

b1c837696ba28b 5y ago

Gated reverb on snare drum. Looking at you, Hugh Padgham.

skeeter2020 5y ago

And all this time we've had star wipe. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, why are we eating hamburger when we can have steak?

hungryhobo 5y ago

probably not another fad, it jus stems from color theory, which have been incorporated in film one way or another for a really long time. Even before these digital color grading took place, scenes in movies are carefully planned out, from set to costumes to lighting, so they fit within a certain range in the color space such it's pleasant for viewers. The orange and teal look is just a very widely used combination that utilizes complementary colors. Even though it's been used a lot i personally still find it quite appealing.

dragontamer 5y ago

> In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion "water/colored dust hitting something" scene. Probably more late-00s than 2010s, but IIRC, the optical-flow slowdown effect was created (and cheaply) distributed. Older slow-mo effects required high FPS cameras. But with 00s technology, you could optical-flow time warp to any slowdown you desired, with mostly good looking results. 300 (released in 2006) was the first popular film that did this, but IIRC the effect was being used in a lot of action films all over the place. Slow-motion was definitely the "Oh wow, that looks cool, and it costs so cheap. Lets do it" effect of the 00s.

basch 5y ago
>300 (released in 2006) was the first popular film that did this Does Spider-Man count in 2002? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7Eou4bV-Q&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM7Eou4bV-Q&t=56s
- dragontamer 5y ago
  That's definitely not the optical-flow slowdown trick I'm talking about. That spiderman slow-motion was some combination of 3d effects and maybe real-life cameras ("Matrix" style: https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/15/vfx-artifacts-the-bullet-time-rig-from-the-matrix/ https://beforesandafters.com/2021/07/15/vfx-artifacts-the-bu...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc This scene from 300 is very clearly just a wide-angle shot (initially), with someone playing with the Optical Flow timewarp effect (sliding it up and down). Its incredibly cheap. See this demo in Premier Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOc_LkZaIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOc_LkZaIk ---------- That's the thing. 300's main innovation was using _cheap_ effects. Optical flow time-warp didn't appear on Premier for another few years, but the algorithm was popular and was just a custom filter / program that was getting passed around at that time.
  - basch 5y ago
    Upon rewatch, im not even convinced its bullet time and not just a bunch of people standing very still. Which worked for the most part in Anna Karenina and that one video of kids playing basketball. Your point makes sense though, the commonization of frame interpolation is a landmark moment.

kazinator 5y ago

> In the 80/90s music videos had fade/dissolve effects. See "Be in my Video" song by Frank Zappa, Them or Us album [1984].

cmckn 5y ago

> Since 2015, color grading is the new fad. Also unnatural weird (LED) lighting, like the left half of the frame in strong red light and the right half in strong blue light. I recently learned this specific combo is called “bisexual lighting”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_lighting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_lighting

cjohnson318 5y ago

I don't think this is a fad. Artists have been purposefully using limited palettes or limited gamuts for a long time. Often, painting the color that you actually see ends up looking garish, amateurish, or at best, out of place. The film industry is just doing what traditional representative Western Art has been doing for hundreds of years; even after artists had access to cheap, vibrant colors.

woolion 5y ago

It's also way easier to have "good colors" (in a color theoretical sense) this way, and achieve a coherent and consistent look throughout the movie. It's thus one of the best ways to keep budget down, as it will hide a lot of issues you'd have while filming, while generally requiring less work. I believe it to be an important factor since full 3D movies have excellent color comps --see for instance Nathan Fowkes' works. (as an side, in the opposite direction, I remember Kung-fu Panda having pretty good colours, yet I found it a bit tiring to watch.)

SavantIdiot 5y ago

"Requiem for a Dream" is a peak fad, notorious for using "MTV Editing": it has over 1500 cuts. Completely unheard of.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Yup. Eventually someone's gonna re-discover that color is a few more bits to flip to aid in your story telling and the fad's gonna go in the trash.