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Teal and Orange


Antti Näyhä

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I think he's full of crap. By his arguments, the color blue is off limits because most skintones will fit his definition of "orange." Mixing different color temperatures of light happens every day in life. It's used so much because it is pleasant and natural looking.

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  • 9 months later...

I don't think it counts when the teal is a person's skin. I read an article elsewhere that was identical, except it gave more examples without skin tones, and it's interesting how overused the scheme is, although the article overstates it as a huge issue.

Edited by Joe Zakko
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What's fascinating is that you have your cold and warm spectrum of colour temperature, which very often I find intercut nicely to show two completely different things happening. A lot of night scenes are almost always towards the blue and a lot of the objects that we need to draw focus too are orange (or candles/fire in a lot of cases).

 

This way of lighting has been around for a while, I just used to think one shot would tend to lean more towards the blue and the other to the orange. Now it seems they're just mixed in one frame more so. There's no excuse for Transformers 2, that movie was wrecked with a nonsensical plotline, characters and dialogue before it had a chance to redeem itself for visuals. Somehow I found that Michael Bay managed to make explosions boring.

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There's a key difference between mixing color temperatures and squeezing strong orange and teal tones in every frame.

 

Mixing daylight and tungsten, candlelight and practicals, blue and green fluorescents, sodium vapour at dawn, that's artistry. Obscene, unexplained blue and teal all over the place is the gimmick.

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Cyan and orange is a more pleasant combination than, let's say, purple and green. In fact, that's one of the reasons it's a common color combination compared to others. We live in a world of mixed sources, often cool daylight, cyan fluorescents, and warm tungsten. It's more commonplace than situations under green and pink neon, for example.

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i'm a firm believer of doing what works. And even if that something has been done before, if it serves the story best, then there shouldn't be an argument.

 

I am of the opinion that people get too caught up in "what is popular" or "what is being overdone"

 

Just my opinion though!

 

But, that being said, it is refreshing to see something being done in a new way, however if it doesn't serve the story then whats the point?

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It only worries me when it starts to become reflexive and unconscious in its usage (like how shaky cam has become the standard for immediacy, realness, etc). It's worrisome when the DP isn't asking WHY he's using this lighting scheme, and merely doing so because it's "purdy" and it's what everyone else is doing. The best DPs build on the de rigeur, or even subvert it.

 

What worries me more is the current trend of shoot night scenes bathed in yellow (see "Social Network" or practically anything shot by Wally Pfister). Yes, it functions on a realist level, since outdoor lighting often give's a yellow cast, but not every situation calls for such verisimilitude, and I enjoy as much the subtle use of blues and greens in night scenes as well.

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Most streets are lit these days with sodium lamps, so it's hard to fight that.

 

But couldn't you work around this through creative location scouting and set design? For me the classic example of this is in Vertigo, wherein Judy's hotel room is near a green neon sign that bathes her room in a soft green light. The resulting scene, where Judy emerges as the reincarnated Madeline is both otherworldly, yet explicable.

 

I find myself wishing there would be more of this thinking, like, "Can't we have this scene outside of some place with a neon sign so we can have some color OTHER than yellow?"

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Most streets are lit these days with sodium lamps, so it's hard to fight that.

Yeah, but it feels almost overdone, or too an extreme on the two examples Brian gave, specifically The Social Network. Ironically enough both of those pictures are up for Oscars. We've all seen the great classics with beautiful nightwork that serves the story well. I think there's a bit of lack of such a classic style, maybe one reason is a fear of grain/noise.

 

I'm sure digital capture will have a further role to play in all of this, I was personally really into the night Arri Alexa campaign with the soccer, looked interesting. Have yet to see much more of the Alexa.

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Most streets are lit these days with sodium lamps, so it's hard to fight that.

 

But that could become an outdated look. Cities are converting to LED's, they just did our street with them. They're a very high color temperature, but a fairly complete spectrum, not like the mercury vapor that was common 20+ years ago. I did a quick check with an old DVD, no green spike.

 

http://www.ledstreetlights.net/ledstreet/?gclid=CNLzwNXp7KYCFRN-5QodMF8UAw

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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I have to worry about LED street lighting. White LEDs are a rather imperfect technology with a reasonably limited life (10,000 hours for a good one at high output, and that's the number at which it'll already be pleasantly lavender in output). It's also extremely difficult for LEDs to match the efficiency of even good fluorescent tubes, let alone the really seriously efficient electron-to-photon converters like sodium vapour.

 

The longevity would be better if they used RGB clusters, but I don't think that's what they're generally doing.

 

P

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I have to worry about LED street lighting. White LEDs are a rather imperfect technology with a reasonably limited life (10,000 hours for a good one at high output, and that's the number at which it'll already be pleasantly lavender in output). It's also extremely difficult for LEDs to match the efficiency of even good fluorescent tubes, let alone the really seriously efficient electron-to-photon converters like sodium vapour.

 

The longevity would be better if they used RGB clusters, but I don't think that's what they're generally doing.

 

P

And I imagine there's a lot more expense too?

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Don't know. When you're talking about things like street lighting I would suspect that the initial cost of the unit pales in comparison to the cost of powering it and, critically, maintaining it over its hopefully multi-decade life. There are amber LED dot-matrix indicator boards on the London Underground which have been in service since the 80s and still look good. This is possibly why LED traffic signals are so popular - those will last probably decades before they need replacing or even significant maintenance, which is not something you get with any other technology. They're also highly efficient, since LEDs can produce coloured light, whereas most other solutions would be a white light and a filter throwing away two thirds of the output. I guess efficiency doesn't seem like such a big deal with traffic lights, but when you consider how many of those there are in the world...

 

Still, I suspect the issue is not so much efficiency of light output as it is efficiency of maintenance, and since a red, amber or green LED is such a hugely reliable and long-lived device. The scary thing about it is that modern printed circuit board manufacturing techniques, particularly those involving lead-free solder flakes blown with hot air at the board during manufacturing, are really not that reliable. Recently, pedestrian traffic signals in the area where I live were replaced with a type involving a ring of eight red LEDs around the pushbutton. I'd say probably a quarter of them now have one or more of these red LEDs nonfunctioning, presumably because the PCBs have failed.

 

To drag us back toward even the periphery of the topic, this is a significant concern with almost all LED lighting, which tends to be a lot of small devices soldered into a PCB.

 

P

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  • 5 years later...

Teal and orange is to colour, what black and white is to exposure. High colour contrast is pleasing to the eye, as is a beautiful silhouette. Colour should be motivated, be it for physiological or practical effect and not forced in a direction just to make an image stand out, the same way you wouldn't crush shadows or blast out highlights. Sure in a line of images, the more contrast there is, the more it will stand out, I believe thats why posters do push it a bit too far, but in films it really isn't necessary or aesthetically pleasing to over push it without practical or artistic motivation.

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