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Why is the world losing color?

(www.culture-critic.com)
322 points trevin | 3 comments | 02 Apr 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.014s | source
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JKCalhoun ◴[02 Apr 25 17:03 UTC] No.43558833[source]▶
Wow, so much to rage about from the article.

I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).

Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.

Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.

Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.

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RiverCrochet ◴[02 Apr 25 17:07 UTC] No.43558863[source]▶
When I learned about teal-orange LUTs I started seeing them everywhere.
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1. joshvm ◴[02 Apr 25 17:44 UTC] No.43559240[source]▶
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.

I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.

It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.

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2. Karrot_Kream ◴[02 Apr 25 18:25 UTC] No.43559741[source]▶
I enjoyed Midsommar's overuse of orange/teal because it really led to the feeling that the viewer was on a psychedelic trip (which usually comes with oversaturating of reds and orange.) Agree that Marvel is doing a lot of trend chasing in its color grading.
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3. WorldMaker ◴[03 Apr 25 17:14 UTC] No.43572691[source]▶
I think the Marvel example is interesting as much because it doesn't seem to just be trend chasing, but also one axis to view Marvel's internal struggles between homogeneity and experimentation/directorial control/capturing the joy of the art of the comics themselves. You can almost directly tell if it was a year that Marvel studio choices were more dominant or if the film's director and editor had more control that year based on the color grading alone.