Thanks so much for posting this! Love it.

This begs the question: who is the most digitally color corrected actor in films? I'm guessing LaBoeuf or LaDamon.

two quick notes: 1) the "Teal/Orange" split is mostly a white-balance thing, spreading your light sources across a broader range of the white balance scale. It's pretty simple, cause 99% of on set lighting starts either daylight balanced Blue (~5500 degrees K), or tungsten balanced Orange (3200 degrees K). But it goes a little deeper than than thematically. Our current visual lexicon tends to represent DAY as Orange, and NIGHT as Blue. So when you're trying to represent a fundamental Day/Night split, Blue/Orange is where you're going to start. Not surprising that it's common. 2) the "Washed-Out Grey" look of post-apocolyptic movies has an interesting history. While it's now standard for the genre (post-apocolyptic or historical war epic), it started with Michael Radford's 1984. Radford and cinematographer Roger Deakins wanted to shoot it Black-and-White, but the studio wouldn't let them. So instead, Deakins used a bleach-bypass process from still photography to ramp up contrast and suck out all the color. They figured it was as close as they could get to black-and-white, without actually shooting black and white. The look worked fantastically, and was widely copied. The use of it in "Saving Private Ryan" pretty much cemented it in the genre.

Denzel. For appearing in more than one Tony Scott film in the past 9 years. Almost instant qualification.

Russell, thanks for that background. You show a degree of intimacy with the subject that far surpasses mere screenwriters, so anything else you'd care to add about the visual nature of storytelling and screenplays, feel free to opine away. I'm sure folks get sick of me yammering on about how movies are primarily a visual medium, so a fresh voice would be more than welcome.

The teal orange thing really doesn't bother me. It's usually not excessive, and I never think people have a fake tan, I always consider that that's how they're lit. That said, there is a great opportunity to differentiate your poster, and your film, by avoiding these common color schemes. So hopefully we'll see more of that. :)

Since, I am a gamer turned cinematographer/ writer. I still use inspirations from the more interactive medium. Here is a blog entry pertaining to the above point by Lalithra Fernando of how Valve got it right. It makes for a very interesting read: http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=2353 Unfortunately, some of the tricks which are used in video games like light emitting fog are just not possible in the real world.

jesus, lots of snobbery minus the knowledge from some guy who finally discovered tints in movies now. first, it's called DI, or digital intermediate, and it's no way "just a few clicks" - it's every bit as labor intensive and time consuming as the processes before it. and no, directors from before were not "only limited" to putting filters on lenses - sophisticated chemical processing of film to saturate/desaturate/tint/grade have been around for decades, as well as other processes like the telecine. the guy was trying to comment on the trend that's beginning to fade (especially with the arrival of films like the Social Network) - keep the skin tone, crush the blacks, push the highlight, and tint the shadow. Stu Maschwitz at Prolost.com has theories and plugins and blogposts about all that.

I went through the article multiple times and I wanted to shout out too. Then I realized that these guys market themselves as a humor website. But since the can is open I will just copy/paste what I was typing earlier. The article wants us to believe that everything is easy with the digital medium. While a part of it is true, the groundwork for all digital corrections lies on the film negative. You need a high quality negative to perform corrections because any sort of correction done on the film is a destructive process. I don’t have much experience but most Cinematographers I have met till now still like to do most of their effects on the cameras. Yes, you can make you digital home videos look cool on a mac. But we are talking about real cinema. On a medium which captures at resolution higher than 8k. No mac can handle that kind of data. That’s why most editors work on low resolution 1k or 2k transfers. People won’t notice it on the small screens but the moment you project it, well… the image will speak for itself. PS: On the cracked topic, it’s not funny because every time I work with new untrained filmmakers I have to spend hours convincing them that these exact things are not so easy.

Russell, thanks for the insight; I'm intrigued from a thematical/conceptual POV why we would see certain colors You said with regard to teal/orange: "So when you’re trying to represent a fundamental Day/Night split, Blue/Orange is where you’re going to start. Not surprising that it’s common." I don't quite understand this. Would you mind elaborating? As I was reading this article, I was wracking my brain trying to recall a very recent instant where I saw this teal/orange split in an older film. Then it dawned on me: the entire carbon freezing chamber sequence in The Empire Strikes Back is color coded that way to marvelous effect. The blue background in the recesses hints at a place of evil and darkness, while the orange, which colors all the skin tones uniformly, reminded me of Hell. Or a sacrificial volcano into which one of our heroes will soon be dropped... Could this be the source and the inspiration for the current style?

Fantastic background, your two quick notes, thank you, Russell.

Fascinating post, Scott, I've long wondered about color trends in movies, thank you for digging into this stuff.