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.
> 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”:
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
There's a strange but wonderful little film called Avalon [0], directed by Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, for which i will now give spoilers.
The film concerns a virtual-reality game, with scenes shot in both the real world and the game. The game world is absolutely drenched in what that article calls "intangible sludge" - everything is a murky brown, and settings are usually fairly spartan, containing little other than the player characters and enemies. The real world, on the other hand, looks naturalistic, albeit shabby, given that this is set in crapsack cyberpunk Eastern European city.
Or at least, you think it is. Until the final act of the film, when the protagonist gains access to a "Class Special A" level in the game - which is simply modern-day Warsaw, shot straight, like a documentary, and as such is crammed with life and colour. After an hour and a half of the various shades of beige in the earlier levels and the real world, your brain has recalibrated itself to that, and so this perfectly normal scene assaults you with its hyperreality. It's a trick, and a simple trick, but it's amazingly effective!
I‘ve been fascinated by this film for years now and highly recommend it for anyone who likes artistic and a bit surreal sci-fi films. It‘s one of the few films that somehow deeply touches me, where I can fully immerse.
The Lord of the Rings theory appeals to me, not because I think it's right, but because those movies set much else in motion that has plagued film since. For one: fight scenes. The constant cuts from close-up to close-up of the faces of those fighting did an absolutely terrible job of getting the combat across, whether the scale, the difficulty, or what was even logically happening. Many of the fight scenes in movies since have focused on the up-close, refusing to use the vast expanse of the movie screen to do what it's built to do — show large-scale action, give a sense of where this is happening in the world, and showing the characters as being a small part of that world instead of, well, giant faces grimly emoting.
I’ve always assumed it’s cheaper to have an editor quick-cut footage into fake combat than to have a choreographer create realistic combat.
Also, combat in general is incredibly boring in modern films. Punch, punch, grunt, grimace - without any consequence. Maybe someone has a cut lip which is gone in the next scene. Superhero movies are the worst for this, where characters routinely throw each other through walls and none of it matters because they are as good as invincible.
There’s a great quote from Jackie Chan about fight scenes: “I never move my camera. Always steady. Wide angle.”
Most action scenes in movies have moving cameras with fast cuts and zoomed in faces. Makes it impossible to actually track what’s happening. I didn’t realize this until I saw this※ YT video specifically about his action comedy style.
I’d also attribute some of this to the superhero glut: they’re generally not very good plots stretched out to many hours and the combat is supposed to be a big draw but since they’ve removed the limits of realism (the audience usually knows who’s going to win, and that the writers can always cancel out the consequences in the next episode either way) there isn’t much left but posturing iconically and visual effects.
I also watched an unhealthy amount of behind-the-scenes for lotr.
Peter Jackson mentioned that there is a thing called „Battle fatigue“. Battles should focus on the the main characters and their journey through a battle. Otherwise battle scenes could get boring or repetitive really quickly.
Grimly emoting is cheap and easy -- convincingly animating large-scale action is difficult and expensive. LARPing it out is difficult and expensive too. I don't think it's a LoTR thing, I think it's an economics thing.
I recall seeing that hyperkinetic cutting in Gladiator a few years before Lord of the Rings. I didn't like it then, either. It conveys the feeling of confusion in a battle, which is realistic, but I don't find it a very interesting feeling.
I'd much rather see something with stakes. It doesn't even have to be that large-scale. Two actors hitting each other -- showing their whole bodies, for at least a few seconds between cuts -- gives me a chance to sense how they feel each other out, what risks they're taking, how a blow actually hurts and has consequences.
If the only emotion I'm getting is "confused", then I'm just marking time until somebody tells me who won and who lost.
I think Saving Private Ryan is an early example of close-ups and jump-cuts in a battle; particularly the opening sequence, where it could get away with it because it's assumed that the audience already knows the story of the Normandy landing "in the large" so showing it "in the small" was an effective story-telling tool to move the audience away from "famous historical battle" to "oh shit all my friends just had their limbs blown off"
There are many large panning/sweeping shots in this series, such as when the ents attack Isengard, orcs besiege Helms Deep, when the fellowship runs through Moria...
Sure there are some quick cuts happening in some swordfighting scenes. And I agree it could have been better if these scenes were shot in a different format.
LoTR for some reason has a "make the detail hard to see with fast camera motion" problem.
I just watched the latest episode of Boba Fett and it had a great fight and a great chase scene. It's like everything was slowed down and you could see the details.
This is so true, I get really bored of combat scenes these days for many reasons, this is a big one.
I remember the first time I really noticed this was when trying to watch batman (can't remember which one), at an "imax" cinema, ya know, those ones where you sit very close to a huge screen designed for films that intentionally fill that extra space with peripheral vision information... But for an already annoyingly close cut series of fight scenes it made it so much worse, unwatchable, I had to just close my eyes for half of the film because it was so physically hard to look at.
I remember listening to the DVD commentary on one of the LOTR films many years ago. One of the things that struck me was the amount of "Oh, and we changed this in post production." Obviously there are limits but CGI, color correction, etc. must lead to a degree of not worrying too much about getting it right in the camera because you can (sorta) fix things later.
I don't think all movies do up-close quick-cut camera shots during fights. I'm fairly certain the reasons they do that are not because it's trendy, but because of other constraints. Things like a lack of actor training, time for practice or reshoots, or good choreography in general. It's what they can use to get away with these things.
Star Trek demonstrates the changing times pretty well.
For the Original Series, the producers were just starting to explore color television and they used the whole pallette.
1990s Star Trek feels more "natural" to me: warm where you expect warmth (ship's crew quarters, hot planets), cool where you expect cool (Borg ship), fairly neutral otherwise, though some of the sets did have an office-park vibe to them.
Current Star Trek, specifically Discovery and Picard, are about as gray-blue and washed-out as ever.
God, I fucking hate the current color grading trend of killing every color except for two opposing ones (usually amber and blue) and then pushing almost everything else into a chiarscuro of inky shadows.
Watch a 90s movie sometime and it will make you weep for how beautiful today's movies could be.
For superhero movies in particular, I think a big part of this is a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the stigma that comics are for kids. They want to sell to an adult audience but adults feel foolish if they consume something too clearly sanitized and kid friendly.
The last thing any Hollywood director wants to do is make their superhero movie look like 1990's "Dick Tracy", or something in the Spy Kids franchise because it will drive adult audiences away. So they slather the whole fucking thing in grimdark so it looks like serious grown-up stuff who are too insecure in their maturity to watch a silly movie about dudes in spandex doing magical acrobatics and punching each other.
(This is also why so much YA fiction which is heavily read by adults is dystopian. And it's why modern superhero movies so rarely have characters use their actual superhero titles, which sounds corny.)
This trend is not really new, and it actually goes both ways: when you want a darker tone, you desaturate the colors and go for a "colder" color palette, when you want to get all warm and fuzzy (think romance movies, soap operas etc.) you use a "warmer" palette and crank up the saturation a bit. But this already annoyed me back in the early 2000s: CSI New York had a "cold" color palette, CSI Miami a warmer one, although (or more likely because) they were both mostly filmed in and around L.A.
Reminds me of an unusual and short-lived sci-fi series called Space Above and Beyond; it predates the current trend significantly.
“The series featured a very dark and desaturated color grading, apparently inherited from the cinematography of series such as The X-Files and Millennium, co-produced by the same team, but taken to a greater extreme. The strength of desaturation employed in many scenes reaches the level that makes them almost black and white (quantitatively, the saturation in CIE xy color subspace of a typical scene in Space: Above and Beyond is in the range 0.03–0.15, approximately 1/4 of a typical contemporary film or television program).”
The video embedded in the Vox article is worth watching. I didn't realize the sepia tones in O' Brother, Where Art Thou were a digital effect using techniques that were very new at the time. The film was digitized, color altered and then printed back to film for distribution.
This article and many of the comments here are mistaking color grading for being the culprit, when it is mostly production design. Grading is obviously the post processing of images, but production design is how the colors are organized to be shot.
Within this current fad, production designers have taken color theory and color symmetry to the extreme and bled all of the primary colors out of what is shot on set. Of course there are accent primaries left in, but they have this down to a science right now and it is why everything looks so perfect these days.
Cinematographers even will gloat about capturing "everything in camera, man" and only having only tweaked minor things in post. Roger Deakins supposedly shot the last Bladerunner like this, where there was little to no grading in the organic scenes.
While I think it's definitely better to get stuff in camera from a craft perspective, this obsession with applying the extreme uses of color theory and winnowing everything down to lifelessness is just so, so boring.
In the 90s things were a little more random and films had a range of colors that lacked symmetry. It felt real! But after the whole teal and orange phase of the 2000s (vomit), people took that same kind of reductionist thinking and broadened the palette ever so slightly.
> One truism of computer effects is that it’s easier to hide their seams if you are placing them in a dark or rainy environment.
I don't own the best TVs in the world, but for the last 5 years (maybe), I have to turn all the lights off when watching movies and series, otherwise I can't see a thing. And if the movie has CG they always happen to be in dark scenes, ergo some movies fully loaded of CG are dark, flat and I have to make an effort to see them (also happens to series/movies for TV only, like those on Netflix).
>The first movie to use digital color manipulation in the way we’d think of it today — i.e., shifting the colors within a film image to meet a digitally achieved palette — is generally considered to be the 2000 Coen brothers’ Great Depression picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Like the "hand held shot" that became popular a decade or so back — in every serious drama the director seemingly gave a GoPro to someone with tremors. A number of TV series were comically unwatchable (well, for me at least).
I thought it was more because of green screen or blue screen dominating production now a days. They had to turn one color off. The side effect.
I was wondering why no one was noticing the lack of color and details in post 2010 films. Watch any 80 or 90s film and see how sharp and details those looked.
In contrast, for Station Eleven they made the colors of the post apocalyptic scenes more vibrant and muted them in the pre apocalyptic scenes to give the idea that the post-apocalyptic world isn't actually so bad.
On the other end of the spectrum (ha) you have over-the-top saturation on shows like The Great British Bake Off. I know it's a food show, but people's skin and eyes sometimes look so bright when shots are overcompensated for food.
Spoiler: Its almost always an artistic choice. However, In some rare cases, its to make up for shit cameras: I'm looking at you RED/Hobbit trilogy. But nowadays its a choice to give the film a certain feel.
There was a while when all action movies were graded to look teal and blue: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho... However when cheaper cameras, better grading tools seeped into the masses, that style was felt to have been played out.
DI, the stage where the colour "grade" is tweaked, crafted and perfected is now an integral part of the edit/VFX stage. Colour is used to push emotion, just like sound and music design.
The bit about LUTs is mostly distraction. LUTs are normally used as a reference, to make sure that all the footage has roughly the same colour (important when you have different cameras for different scenes) They are static colour offsets, so are great for techincal colouring, but not overly useful for making an artistic grade.
TLDR: Its a fashion, just like the pricks who removed the obvious on/off indicators from slider buttons.
[+] [-] 323|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lloeki|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] lkxijlewlf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmckn|4 years ago|reply
I recently learned this specific combo is called “bisexual lighting”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexual_lighting
[+] [-] dragontamer|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cloudef|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjohnson318|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b1c837696ba28b|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woolion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hungryhobo|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
See "Be in my Video" song by Frank Zappa, Them or Us album [1984].
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|4 years ago|reply
The film concerns a virtual-reality game, with scenes shot in both the real world and the game. The game world is absolutely drenched in what that article calls "intangible sludge" - everything is a murky brown, and settings are usually fairly spartan, containing little other than the player characters and enemies. The real world, on the other hand, looks naturalistic, albeit shabby, given that this is set in crapsack cyberpunk Eastern European city.
Or at least, you think it is. Until the final act of the film, when the protagonist gains access to a "Class Special A" level in the game - which is simply modern-day Warsaw, shot straight, like a documentary, and as such is crammed with life and colour. After an hour and a half of the various shades of beige in the earlier levels and the real world, your brain has recalibrated itself to that, and so this perfectly normal scene assaults you with its hyperreality. It's a trick, and a simple trick, but it's amazingly effective!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_(2001_film)
[+] [-] maxhq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] royjacobs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flenserboy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
Also, combat in general is incredibly boring in modern films. Punch, punch, grunt, grimace - without any consequence. Maybe someone has a cut lip which is gone in the next scene. Superhero movies are the worst for this, where characters routinely throw each other through walls and none of it matters because they are as good as invincible.
[+] [-] jonpurdy|4 years ago|reply
Most action scenes in movies have moving cameras with fast cuts and zoomed in faces. Makes it impossible to actually track what’s happening. I didn’t realize this until I saw this※ YT video specifically about his action comedy style.
※ - https://youtu.be/Z1PCtIaM_GQ
[+] [-] acdha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] v7p1Qbt1im|4 years ago|reply
Peter Jackson mentioned that there is a thing called „Battle fatigue“. Battles should focus on the the main characters and their journey through a battle. Otherwise battle scenes could get boring or repetitive really quickly.
Also it‘s cheaper, as someone else said.
[+] [-] jjoonathan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfengel|4 years ago|reply
I'd much rather see something with stakes. It doesn't even have to be that large-scale. Two actors hitting each other -- showing their whole bodies, for at least a few seconds between cuts -- gives me a chance to sense how they feel each other out, what risks they're taking, how a blow actually hurts and has consequences.
If the only emotion I'm getting is "confused", then I'm just marking time until somebody tells me who won and who lost.
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixGtngBdhE&ab_channel=EdenK...
[+] [-] aidenn0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parenthesis|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZD1qScUYA
[+] [-] adflux|4 years ago|reply
There are many large panning/sweeping shots in this series, such as when the ents attack Isengard, orcs besiege Helms Deep, when the fellowship runs through Moria...
Sure there are some quick cuts happening in some swordfighting scenes. And I agree it could have been better if these scenes were shot in a different format.
[+] [-] dekhn|4 years ago|reply
I just watched the latest episode of Boba Fett and it had a great fight and a great chase scene. It's like everything was slowed down and you could see the details.
[+] [-] tomxor|4 years ago|reply
I remember the first time I really noticed this was when trying to watch batman (can't remember which one), at an "imax" cinema, ya know, those ones where you sit very close to a huge screen designed for films that intentionally fill that extra space with peripheral vision information... But for an already annoyingly close cut series of fight scenes it made it so much worse, unwatchable, I had to just close my eyes for half of the film because it was so physically hard to look at.
[+] [-] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcranberry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psim1|4 years ago|reply
For the Original Series, the producers were just starting to explore color television and they used the whole pallette.
1990s Star Trek feels more "natural" to me: warm where you expect warmth (ship's crew quarters, hot planets), cool where you expect cool (Borg ship), fairly neutral otherwise, though some of the sets did have an office-park vibe to them.
Current Star Trek, specifically Discovery and Picard, are about as gray-blue and washed-out as ever.
The pictures in this tweet show it perfectly: https://twitter.com/ShelfNerds/status/1481452739754405889
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
Watch a 90s movie sometime and it will make you weep for how beautiful today's movies could be.
For superhero movies in particular, I think a big part of this is a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the stigma that comics are for kids. They want to sell to an adult audience but adults feel foolish if they consume something too clearly sanitized and kid friendly.
The last thing any Hollywood director wants to do is make their superhero movie look like 1990's "Dick Tracy", or something in the Spy Kids franchise because it will drive adult audiences away. So they slather the whole fucking thing in grimdark so it looks like serious grown-up stuff who are too insecure in their maturity to watch a silly movie about dudes in spandex doing magical acrobatics and punching each other.
(This is also why so much YA fiction which is heavily read by adults is dystopian. And it's why modern superhero movies so rarely have characters use their actual superhero titles, which sounds corny.)
[+] [-] rob74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aranchelk|4 years ago|reply
“The series featured a very dark and desaturated color grading, apparently inherited from the cinematography of series such as The X-Files and Millennium, co-produced by the same team, but taken to a greater extreme. The strength of desaturation employed in many scenes reaches the level that makes them almost black and white (quantitatively, the saturation in CIE xy color subspace of a typical scene in Space: Above and Beyond is in the range 0.03–0.15, approximately 1/4 of a typical contemporary film or television program).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond
[+] [-] mwattsun|4 years ago|reply
I've uploaded a before and after shot of the baptism scene here: https://imgur.com/a/yAugAV0
Painting With Pixels (O' Brother, Where Art Thou)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pla_pd1uatg
Description: This short video about the Coen brother's film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou', the first feature film to employ a full digital colour grade.
[+] [-] l33tbro|4 years ago|reply
Within this current fad, production designers have taken color theory and color symmetry to the extreme and bled all of the primary colors out of what is shot on set. Of course there are accent primaries left in, but they have this down to a science right now and it is why everything looks so perfect these days.
Cinematographers even will gloat about capturing "everything in camera, man" and only having only tweaked minor things in post. Roger Deakins supposedly shot the last Bladerunner like this, where there was little to no grading in the organic scenes.
While I think it's definitely better to get stuff in camera from a craft perspective, this obsession with applying the extreme uses of color theory and winnowing everything down to lifelessness is just so, so boring.
In the 90s things were a little more random and films had a range of colors that lacked symmetry. It felt real! But after the whole teal and orange phase of the 2000s (vomit), people took that same kind of reductionist thinking and broadened the palette ever so slightly.
[+] [-] scoutt|4 years ago|reply
I don't own the best TVs in the world, but for the last 5 years (maybe), I have to turn all the lights off when watching movies and series, otherwise I can't see a thing. And if the movie has CG they always happen to be in dark scenes, ergo some movies fully loaded of CG are dark, flat and I have to make an effort to see them (also happens to series/movies for TV only, like those on Netflix).
This, or my forties are hitting hard.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|4 years ago|reply
I have enough of that in my daily life, lately; i don’t need more.
[+] [-] rasz|4 years ago|reply
>The first movie to use digital color manipulation in the way we’d think of it today — i.e., shifting the colors within a film image to meet a digitally achieved palette — is generally considered to be the 2000 Coen brothers’ Great Depression picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou?
and not 1999 green tint Matrix?
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
And we'll laugh about it some day.
Like the "hand held shot" that became popular a decade or so back — in every serious drama the director seemingly gave a GoPro to someone with tremors. A number of TV series were comically unwatchable (well, for me at least).
[+] [-] habibur|4 years ago|reply
I was wondering why no one was noticing the lack of color and details in post 2010 films. Watch any 80 or 90s film and see how sharp and details those looked.
[+] [-] SirHound|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|4 years ago|reply
https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/1/10/22872347/station-eleve...
[+] [-] pwenzel|4 years ago|reply
For comparison to the desaturated things on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kMICkmW8r8
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-h...
[+] [-] KaiserPro|4 years ago|reply
There was a while when all action movies were graded to look teal and blue: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho... However when cheaper cameras, better grading tools seeped into the masses, that style was felt to have been played out.
DI, the stage where the colour "grade" is tweaked, crafted and perfected is now an integral part of the edit/VFX stage. Colour is used to push emotion, just like sound and music design.
The bit about LUTs is mostly distraction. LUTs are normally used as a reference, to make sure that all the footage has roughly the same colour (important when you have different cameras for different scenes) They are static colour offsets, so are great for techincal colouring, but not overly useful for making an artistic grade.
TLDR: Its a fashion, just like the pricks who removed the obvious on/off indicators from slider buttons.
EDIT: If you want to see some interesting grading, look up "day for night" https://noamkroll.com/color-grading-tutorial-creating-a-day-... where they take normal footage and make it look like it was shot at night
[+] [-] kranke155|4 years ago|reply
It’s changing now with color spaces like ACES becoming the standard (wider color gamut).
I Work in the industry.