and right below from where you got that cap is this one



This certainly seems to lean a little more green to me and the flesh tones less orange-y than in the Bay example. I'm using the phrase 'teal and orange' as short hand to mean a very constricted and unnatural/artificial looking spectrum with a preponderance of tones in the green/blue range.

That's the point. It's not logical
As that particular blogger goes on to write-

He's referring to Hot Tub Time Machine there, which is as blatant an example of T&O as Bay's Transformer films. Of the caps I posted earlier, Safe House falls into this same, way over the top level as well- but everything I've posted from the modern era shows a preponderance towards the same cliched set of hues. Movies today, generally speaking, look cartoonish- and it has nothing whatsoever to do with CG.

I purposefully stayed away from posting Michael Bay examples because that's the easy way to go- and then people try to dismiss it because, after all "it's just how Michael Bay rolls". My point was this aesthetic of a constricted, cartoon simplified spectrum, goes beyond him and affects/infects quite a lot of other films from many different genres.
It's no longer just a sci-fi/fantasy film here and there that is using it to suggest a skewed reality. It shows up in comedies, dramas, rom coms, period films.

It is the visual height of banality in modern films.

So go back to my earlier example of "blue light at night" - is that not as "unnatural and artificial?"

Movies are not real at their core. In order to enjoy a film you have to constantly suspend your disbelief - that fall would kill a person, no one answers the phone like that, no one speaks in such perfectly delivered back and forth, etc. Why are you giving your "sympathies" toward this particularly trend? Why is this being singled out?

I shoot video for a living and have spent the last 15 years looking at the world through a viewfinder. And this teal and orange thing doesn't even phase me, I think because I'm used to things not looking like reality.

Up until this color scheme, movies have never shown us anything that would be physically impossible.

If the criticism is - this is overused these days- I wouldn't disagree with you. Hyper-stylization in general is over used.

The point wasn't that it was impossible so much as it is
1) unnatural and therefore a stylistic conceit
2) this same conceit is used so often that it is no longer special or unique
3) and is now used with no sense of taste, proportion or melody.

Apparently going by the responses in this thread, people's visual response palates have been so numbed and desensitized by the overuse of this, that a broad natural range of hues looks "drab" and cap after cap of the same three or four hues only looks 'slightly stylized'.

If people can't see a big difference between the older films capped in post 40 and the T&O (or matrix-y green if you prefer) shots sprinkled around then I don't know what to say.

I gave it my best shot.

I don't think it's that we "can't see the difference"...it's that the shots have been chosen specifically to prove some kind of point, when an equal number of shots could have been posted that disproved that point.

No one is going to get upset that some movies use a particular color scheme. Plenty use other schemes, old and new. I bet if you really looked, you could find "teal and orange" in older films too.

In fact, you yourself did just that with your example above.

I appreciate your posts on this. I didn't know any of the technical stuff, but I watch mostly older films and have commented to friends numerous times as to how much more drab the colors seem to be in modern films.

Give me this any day of the week:

The point here is a good one and those who argue against it haven't really proven that such a trend doesn't exist....only that it doesn't bother them, it's the nature of movies, etc.

I think it contributes to a serious point about Hollywood that on one level could have always been the case but that in the past 10-15 years is unavoidable and irrefutable....which is that Hollywood movies tend to look alike, no matter what the studio, what the genre, and with technology evolving the way it is, the budget doesn't matter either.

Assessing a film on technical merits of cinematography is a joke today. The shittiest film can look as good as a masterpiece. Sometimes shitty even looks "better." Like, look at the difference between SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and HANNIBAL RISING. The latter film is gorgeous to look at, perfectly composed and lit, with all the color values we associate with "high quality Hollywood." SILENCE OF THE LAMBS looks low-rent next to HANNIBAL RISING. And the movie's a piece of shit.

One Hollywood movie looks as good as another these days. Which is another way of saying, nobody really cares about how a movie looks.....as long as it looks "Hollywoody" and justifies the price of an HDTV. (Which hardly anyone knows how to calibrate.)

I just don't understand this at all. So now movies look too good? Gorgeous to look at, perfectly composed and lit...and that's a bad thing?

I'm sure older movies were striving for those same things but were limited by technology and equipment. But now apparently those movies are looked at through the veil of nostalgia and seem somehow more "real" than the slicker productions of today.

I truly believe this is a lack of awareness about films that aren't the best the genre has to offer. The best movies of today will endure just as the best movies of the past have endured. There were shitty trends before and there will be shitty trends again. Just look at 3D. That's a tech that was basically discarded...and now it's back again. I think that's doing far more damage to the industry than "teal and orange" could ever hope too.

So yeah, great...lots of movies use teal and orange. Lots of movies don't. So....what does that prove exactly?

My bigger pet peeve today is the emphasis on eye color. They make blue eyes pop off the screen. It's almost always a vanity thing and not really anything to do with story or character.

I've heard about industry research that 16-and-under moviegoers prefer Teal and Orange color timing for whatever reason. Anything else to them seems dated now. There are movie executives that firmly believe this affects the box office take, so they keep doing it.

hmmm, good point. They're using the psychology of color - kind of how the color red makes people hungry, which is why restaurants use it A LOT.

Don't worry, once The Hobbit comes out there will be a new trend that everyone will bitch about. I'm not crazy about the teal & orange trend myself, but outside of a few shitty movies, I have not noticed it much.

Waaaaaaaaah

"First World" problems fo reelz yo.

It's not that we don't "see the problem"; just that it doesn't bother us.

FWIW the vast majority of films I watch are pre-1974...

There is sort of bleached out look that movie have had for the last ten years that does bug me, it makes things seem "less cinematic" or something to my eye

The first digitally projected film I saw was Toy Story 2. What year was that? 1999?

Paul SD, please clarify for me. Blade Runner and Chinatown have not been re-colored or tweeked right? You're doing the tweeking yourself for the sake of an example right?

Also, obviously the look is over used on new movies, but what old movies have been revised and had their colors fucked with? Someone mentioned Aliens, is that true?

I know The Matrix got the green hue in there to be in line w/ Reloaded and Revolutions.

My hometown got its first Digital Projector in April 2002, just prior to Spider-man's release. And it had been around for quite some time at that point.

Yeah, what happened to Aliens?

After googling it, it seem that the Aliens Quadrilogy set, Cameron tweaked the coloring that's noticeable when they arive on LV-whatever, so it ends up looking more teal and orange, than blue and deeper reds and browns.

It looks atrocious. It's one of my favorite movies, but I had to turn it off halfway in because the new two tone color scheme was so distracting and off-putting. Almost every single thing is either blue or bright orange now.

I recomend you guys check out Lars Von Trier's The Element of Crime. Made in 1984. All orange with a little teal. LVT was so ahead of his time.

That's funny because ALIENS already has lots of blue in it. I've always preferred it's color palette to that of the other Alien films. But that's weird that Cameron enhanced it even more. I have the Special Edition DVD, so I guess I have more reason not to upgrade to the Quadrilogy version (although I hate the SE scene of LV-426 prior to Ripley's arrival).