9 ms·
Distribution of colors in movie posters between 1914 and 2012
- fritzvd 14y agoWasn't this here before? It's still cool though :)
- fallenhitokiri 14y agoI am not sure, I did not know it and just found it on a blog and I did not see any timestamp
- carpo 14y agoI 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?
- ekianjo 14y agoMore red/yellow before, more blue/violet in recent history. Cool data set, but the question is "so what?".
- gradstudent 14y agoWell, 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-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/teal-and-orange...
- kitsune_ 14y agoThat was a very interesting link, thanks a lot.
- shimfish 14y agoI 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 14y agoThat'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.
- thaumaturgy 14y agoHuh. I'm fairly color-blind, so I can't see the orange (or teal) tones that he's complaining about. However, I have noticed that more films lately seem to have more detail, and everything just "looks better" to me. I've read that some amount of color-blindness is context sensitive (e.g. http://www.designmatrix.com/pl/cyberpl/cic.html http://www.designmatrix.com/pl/cyberpl/cic.html); I bet that the increased contrast in these films is part of what's making them so much more visually appealing to me.
- fallenhitokiri 14y agoI'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)
- TeMPOraL 14y agoMaybe they couldn't use some colors in older times due to technological limitations of chemical/print process?
- jayfuerstenberg 14y agoLooks 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.
- yesbabyyes 14y agoOr it was Star Wars. ;-)
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoPlausible; as it happens again in 1980 (Empire Strikes Back)
- yread 14y agoInteresting that there are no black columns ie no colors which consistently wouldn't be used. Green is represented very little though
- NanoWar 14y agoI wonder what happened in 1921. It was out of control!
- MengYuanLong 14y agoThe 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.
- ColinWright 14y agoIn 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.
- jaredsohn 14y agoI don't remember any discussion of wget vs. curl in the movie and couldn't find anything specific to the movie about that on Google; I'm guessing that the the OP just decided to use wget instead of curl because that was what they were using in the movie. (If I'm wrong, somebody please correct me.) Here is a comparison of wget and curl that was posted on Hacker News a little over two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241479 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241479
- mcpherrinm 14y agoI think this is mostly one line in which Mark Zuckerberg says something along the lines of "time for a little wget magic". Certainly not a major plot point. Here's what I think is the relevant scene on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOzMz-fOOw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOzMz-fOOw
- VMG 14y agoWow, I was surprised on how realistic that was. Maybe I should watch the movie after all.
- grimboy 14y agoIt's actually quite a good film if you ignore the character assassination of Zuckerberg (not that he really needs defending, just it seems a little cheap).
- dclowd9901 14y agoI don't think it's fair to call it character-assassination. He didn't paint Zuck with a pretty brush, but I'm not sure any first-tier founders made it to where they are without delivering a few cheap blows themselves. There's definitely some sense of admiration for "Zuck the Doer", not "Zuck the Dreamer".
- alister 14y agoI 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?)
- StavrosK 14y agoWell, a week is about $2500, so I guess it'd take around $5k.
- noahc 14y agoThere are many people who would call $2500 their two day rate. So, $10k+ doesn't seem that far fetched for a project of this complexity that delivers business value of some sort.
- Zev 14y agoPeople who charge $150+/hour are rarely working 8 (billable) hours a day.
- noahc 14y agoI think that's far. I mostly posted because I don't want people to believe that $5k is the most you could get for this project. There are infinite ways you could add a ton of value to this project that would be worth more than $5k. Automating the data retrieval and plugging it into mechanical turk for verification, being able to critique or comment on the deeper meaning of the change in colors. Or even online marketing to get the backlinks for a business could potentially be worth $10k.
- StavrosK 14y agoI'm sorry, isn't this just a histogram of all the posters for that year? Am I missing something (e.g. a page I didn't see)? It doesn't take that long to make a histogram of a "movie posters year X" Google image search...
- JacobIrwin 14y agoI'm curious about the distribution of ink costs (by color) during the same timespan - just how close that correlation is.
- shiftb 14y agoThis 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?
- jszmajda 14y ago+1, I think this must've played a large role in color selection, especially considering the large print runs these posters had to have.
- haddr 14y agobut hey, isn't there any color corruption during scanning/digitalisation of those posters?
- jeffool 14y agoI 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.
- mbq 14y agoBut 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.
- gulbrandr 14y agoRelated: http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ Shows an entire movie in a single image.
- vijayr 14y agoCan anyone explain how this works?
- FelipeCortez 14y agoI 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 14y agoBasically, 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.
- kator 14y agoLooks like Star Wars posters messed up 1977!? http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977 http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977
- kator 14y agoHmm again in 1980: http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1980 http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1980 Maybe Lucas really was a visionary!
- damian2000 14y agoBefore clicking I thought it was Jaws, but wrong year.
- five_star 14y agoCool! Color combinations form sinusoid throughout the history.
- hammerbrostime 14y agoInteresting 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 14y agoI 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-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.ie/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hol...
- ricardobeat 14y agoThere's plenty of blue in 1919-21, but it disappears for the following decades. Either the data is seriously biased or something happened here.
- ZacharyPitts 14y agoI 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-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho... It is.
- jmaygarden 14y agoIt definitely does seam to go teal heavy from the 80's onward.
- scott_s 14y agoI 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."
- aw3c2 14y agoWhile 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 14y agoAgree. 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.
- bane 14y agoThe 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.
- scott_s 14y agoI take it you have not seen this yet (linked elsewhere in the thread, but it's been on HN a few times): http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoI'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-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...
- splicer 14y agoI don't see The Matrix. I wonder if it was left out because it's on outlier (too green/yellow).
- vernon 14y agoFascinating viewing. Wonder what changed us from being all sunshine and light to being all doom and gloom. I blame the Dark Knight.
- jdavid 14y agoIt 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.
- presidentender 14y agoWhat happened in 1977?
- danbee 14y agoStar Wars?
- Ogre 14y agoAnd Close Encounters, and Saturday Night Fever, which both have blue-ish posters here: http://www.imdb.com/list/_EcfN1DMzJQ/ 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/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075925/
- squarecat 14y agoWait, so they all fall on the visible spectrum?
- squarecat 14y agoOK, so who's going to do the correlation with en vogue colors from the same years (fashion, paint, cars, etc.)?
- ricardobeat 14y agoHa, you can see the teal trend getting stronger in the 2000s. I wonder why the colorfulness of 1919-1921 was so quickly reverted?
- Aloha 14y agoI wonder how much this adjusts for natural fading in prints.
- Erifcit 14y agoIf they were scanned in recently, doesn't this just prove that print materials do indeed yellow over time?