Concerning orange and teal: You've already probably noticed, but due to digital processing and color-grading, many movies nowadays are constrained to a palette of orange and blue, normally to most film purists' dismay. This is discussed all over the web and is occurring in both modern films and older movies re-released in "remastered" blu-ray.
Here are some good articles and blog rants, if you're bored:
http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie ... -and-blue/
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/au ... -hollywood
http://notonbluray.com/blog/orange-and-teal/
http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/ ... -stop.html
I think a lot of this criticism is pretty damning and it's very hard to un-see this palette the minute you realize it's used everywhere, all the time.
Which brings me to Fury Road, a movie I love that is undeniably overflowing with yellow and orange and blue and teal.
I found a few blog posts that include pictures of the film as it appears in the movie, and pictures of the film regraded to resemble a more "natural" color palette. You can find them here: http://color-rant.blogspot.com/2015_05_01_archive.html
On first impression, it's clear the more natural color palette is a lot darker and de-saturated, while the "regraded" images are brighter, with colors that pop in a hyper-vivid fashion - and yes, there's a good deal more orange. Which do I prefer, though? It's hard to say. This might be the first movie I'm unexpectedly torn over when it comes to the orange and teal epidemic. I think, ultimately, the movie looks fantastic, but the night scenes seemed a little too unusually alien to me (although there's a reason for this, which Miller explains in a quote I provide later in this post).
It's worth noting the movie was filmed in Namibia, which naturally looks like this:
Funny enough, George Miller has discussed the whole orange and teal thing with regard to Fury Road a few times, once in the LA Times, once in the Star-Telegram, and another instance in /Film.
The desert landscape of Namibia, where shooting took place over eight months, had its own otherworldly beauty, which Miller heightened by hyper-saturating the color in the film to near-psychedelic vividness. "We only had teal and orange to work with, so we embraced it," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/mo ... tml#page=1
“The nighttime sequences were shot day-for-night, which is the way a lot of Westerns did them too, because horses don’t have headlights, and our main vehicle [the War Rig driven by Theron] doesn’t either. Even Riley Keough, who plays one of the five women Max is helping to rescue, evoked 1950s Westerns with her bright red hair. The film uses a lot of saturated colors, mostly teal and orange, and her hair was striking. When I cast her, I didn’t even know she was Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, which is in itself another homage to the past.”
http://www.star-telegram.com/entertainm ... rylink=cpy
We spent a lot of time in DI (digital intermediate), and we had a very fine colorist, Eric Whipp. One thing I’ve noticed is that the default position for everyone is to de-saturate post-apocalyptic movies. There’s only two ways to go, make them black and white — the best version of this movie is black and white, but people reserve that for art movies now. The other version is to really go all-out on the color. The usual teal and orange thing? That’s all the colors we had to work with. The desert’s orange and the sky is teal, and we either could de-saturate it, or crank it up, to differentiate the movie. Plus, it can get really tiring watching this dull, de-saturated color, unless you go all the way out and make it black and white.
http://www.slashfilm.com/fury-road-trivia/3/
Like /Film points out, Miller thinks the best version of Fury Road is in black and white, which I find intriguing. It almost seems like he would have preferred to have released it in black and white but for obvious financial reasons couldn't. Fortunately, it appears we're gonna get a black and white blu-ray cut, so I'll def be checking that out.
Any thoughts?
