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"All of Castlevania's level palettes incorporated orange in some way. And often incorporated shades of blue, which is orange's complement. A.k.a., it makes orange 'pop out'. It made everything really pop in general, and the game felt alive."
Basic complementary color theory states that when two contrasting colors are put together, they "pop," so the natural technique is to color films to have a strong, contrasting palette.
The one thing you will almost always have in a film is people. Human skin runs from pale pinkish yellow to dark brown, all of which are shades of orange. The color that contrasts best with orange is blue.
So you just turn up the shadows to the teal end, the highlights to the orange.
Unlike other pairs of complementary colors, fiery orange and cool blue are strongly associated with opposing concepts — fire and ice, land and sea, day and night, invested humanism vs. elegant indifference, good old fashioned explosions vs. futuristic science stuff. It's a trope because it's used on purpose, and it does something.
More here , here and here. Games have also picked up on this trend, and you can find some of the worst offenders on this Tumblr. A discussion of the coloring trends - especially in orange as they pertain to comics is here.
Subtrope of Mood Lighting and sister trope to Unnaturally Blue Lighting, as well a very specific and common form of Color Contrast and Color Wash. Not to be confused with Blue and Orange Morality (even when it overlaps with Good Colors, Evil Colors, as in TRON: Legacy). Ties in with Hollywood Darkness, which is usually blue or teal.
Has a vague resemblance to the Loudness War; in both cases, something is pushed Up to Eleven in post-production, removing all subtlety from the sound or picture. Can be a factor in Digital Destruction.
Examples
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Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
- The carbon chamber from The Empire Strikes Back is dimly lit with orange lighting and surrounded by blue-tinged darkness, providing an eerie contrast for the first showdown between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. It also predates the modern "Blue and Orange" phenomenon by about two decades.
- Blade Runner features this in almost every scene. It's part of its distinctive visual style.
- The Bourne Identity
- Night at the Museum
- G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
- Transformers (live-action movie)
- Spider-Man 2.1 (Spider-Man 2 DVD release)
- N.E.X.T.
- Secretariat, though to a lesser degree than most.
- The Transporter 2
- TRON: Legacy: The actual movie itself consists mostly of this. This movie could have been grandfathered in, the original TRON was mostly black-and-white with Red and Blue glow-lines. For the sequel they kept the Blue glow intact, but then they went and tweaked the Red to be various, mostly Orange-ish shades.
- Iron Man 1, 2, and 3.
- The later movies in The Fast and the Furious series exhibit this trope:
- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
- Fast & Furious
- Fast Five
- Feast of Love
- The Hangover
- Serenity, one of the first to do this the way 2000s movies are doing it
- Limitless
- Limitless is an interesting example because of the way it's used; whenever somebody takes the NZT, the scene will shift from blue highlights to orange highlights, and vice versa when it wears off.
- Rabbit Hole
- The Last Airbender
- In Hollow Man, invisibility serum is blue and counterserum is orange. Also, in thermal vision living organisms are mostly orange/red and the environment is mostly blue.
- Cowboys and Aliens, might as well be called Orange and Teal.
- The Doors by Oliver Stone uses this a lot, especially in the drug use scenes.
- Easy A.
- The Indian film Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is strong with this — but more with yellow-blue than specifically orange-blue.
- Drive. In the opening sequence, the only colours (with the exception of the pink title) are the blue and orange coming from the lighting in Los Angeles at night.
- Live Free Or Die Hard — in places you would swear you're looking at a race of orange humans.
- The song and dance number in Om Shanti Om called Dard E Disco has lovely orange blue contrast with gold tones for about 3/4 of the song.
- Minority Report
- Sunshine
- Gattaca, to a ridiculous degree.
- At least one of the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets posters use a blue and orange-gold contrast, as well as early posters of the first film.
- The Darjeeling Limited turns it Up to Eleven.
- Scott Pilgrim purposely uses this trope as a parody for Lucas Lee's movies. All of his movie posters are off-the-scale blue/orange contrast.
- Skyfall. Possibly lampshaded at one point in Shanghai, where the lighting keeps switching between orange and blue.
- The Hobbit. The scenes in the goblins' caves. The orange of the flames with the blueness of the darkness.
- In Peter Pan, when Peter pauses in the bedroom window, his body is lit in orange from the room with a blue moonlit background.
Live-Action TV
- Gilmore Girls suffers from this especially in its first season.
- The sixth series of the Doctor Who revival is virtually bichromatic. It's still present in the seventh - "Nightmare in Silver" uses it to show the two sides of the Doctor's mindscape when the Cyber-Planner starts taking over.
- Burn Notice uses this all the time too. Watch out for Michael's orange skin, paired with a light blue shirt. Happens almost every other scene
- Instant Star used a blue filter for the school interior sequences, to better match the late 19th/early 20th century stone High School building they used for exteriors and disguise the interior sets built for the midcentury-modern Degrassi school building.
- Interesting use in Awake, where the two different universes that the show alternates between each get their own color pallete: Red/orange for the reality where Britten's wife is alive, and green/blue for the one where his son is. It actually serves a purpose in making it obvious to a careful viewer which one the scene is taking place in.
- CSI: Miami had a very saturated color palate while CSI: New York was originally darker and drearier. When the two crossed over guess which characters were bathed in golden light while the other was in dark blue shadows.
- Fringe has this in spades. The intro sequence started off blue, but would change to red-orange depending on which universe the episode took place in, sometimes switching back and forth to show frequent transitions during the episode. Much more subtle during the fifth season, but nonetheless present; often the now-fugitive Fringe team would have to double back to Walter's old Harvard lab, which is an orange hue due to being ambered, while the scenes that show them evading the Observers have a bluish tint.
Music
- Sugar's landmark album Copper Blue has it both on the cover◊ and in the title: pure metallic copper is a vivid metallic orange, while copper sulfate is an intense blue.
Music Videos
- The music video for "Remember the Name" by Fort Minor is between this and a green wash. While Mike is rapping, it's more this, while Ryu gets the greenest parts.
- The video for Zedd's "Clarity" is entirely based on this concept.
New Media
- In its four-color mode — the one used by boot screens and the Workbench UI — the Amiga originally used black, white, blue, and orange.
- Also one of the display palettes for the Apple II, though not as commonly used as black, white, green and purple/magenta.
- Google always had blue links, now it's using quite a bit of orange as well.
- The Firefox logo and default color scheme.
Pro Wrestling
- Unlike most wrestlers in WWE, Sin Cara has special lighting during his matches. Said lighting is orange and blue. Sin Cara's ring attire and entrance video are also orange and blue.
- WrestleMania XXVIII utilizes this for their poster.
Video Games
- Mass Effect. Also on a meta level, the first game used a lot more clean blues and whites in game and the user interface was blue, while the second switched to gritter oranges and browns and the user interface turned orange.
- Too Human
- Battlefield 3 uses this trope heavily throughout the game.
- Blue icons are used for the friendly team, orange for the opposing.
- The menu interface.
- Game/DLC posters. Orange for gunfire/explosions, blue for cooler atmospheric areas.
- Maps like Operation Metro and Death Valley are washed in blue, while Bandar Desert and Tallah Market is washed in orange.
- Explosions and muzzle flashes, are notably orange in color.
- Brink Orange for Resistance, Blue for Security, all other colors for scenery.
- Crash Bandicoot is a walking orange-blue contrast.
- Tomb Raider II - Some of the level with the Maria Doria are strongly orange/teal. Surprisingly for a non-realistic PC game from 1997.
- Vagrant Story
- Portal: Everything significant to gameplay that comes in two forms, with the exception of the black and white test chamber walls themselves, is blue and orange: the two ends of the portal; the propulsion and repulsion gels; the pushing and pulling states of the excursion funnels; the off and on states of the lights indicating a connection with the Big Red Buttons; the highlights on Atlas and P-Body; even the "eyes" of Wheatley and GLaDOS.
- The test chambers in Portal were deliberately made mostly cool blues in contrast to the warm oranges of the behind-the scenes-areas.
- The Half-Life series in general is also pretty fond of this (orange HEV suit, blue G-Man, orange Resistance, blue Combine, blue Citadel in Half-Life 2 contrasting with the orange destroyed Citadel in Episode 1, etc).
- The giant clock venue in Rock Band has shades of this, more so in the second game than the third.
- Jagged Alliance
- Outland. At least it served a gameplay-important purpose....
- The video game adaptations of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows use practically only blue and orange shades throughout the game.
- Every boxart for the classic Mega Man series features this.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption used this for box art and other artwork, but not quite as much for the game itself — while blue is rather prominent because of Phazon becoming more abundant, orange is largely limited to Samus and her gunship.
- The original Metroid Prime had two distinct types of Phazon. Guess what colors they were. Sadly, this particular plot point was more potential than kinetic.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword exaggerates it for the Silent Realm in order to emphasize how alien the alternate dimension is. However, everything turns red whenever Link is spotted.
- The new Mortal Kombat has this on the cover and, to a lesser extent, on the main menu background; both achieve this by putting Scorpion and Sub-Zero opposite each other.
- The title screen◊ of Aleste 2 features redhead Ellinor Waizen and the title in red-orange lettering against a deep-blue background.
- Singularity: only in the time-warped alternate-2011, though. In 1955, a more normal color palette is used. This is to help show off the unnatural state of the world in 2011.
- Sonic and Tails of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, where the titular hedgehog and his fox companion are colored blue and orange respectively.
- As noted in the page quote, the original Castlevania for the NES had most, if not all, of its foreground scenery orange, complete with many blue backdrops throughout the game. Even Simon's sprites were a yellow-orange to help him pop out. Averted in Vampire Killer for the MSX2, which used a color palette of more subdued browns and shades of gray.
- X3: Reunion's boxart◊. Also, many ships are rendered in blue-gray, and many sectors are lit in red.
- Red Faction Guerrilla is set on Mars, a planet coated almost exclusively in red-orange dust. Indeed, most of the games environments are variations on this theme. So rather than have the traditional orangey-yellow explosions and muzzle flares on the guns, the flame effects are distinctively blue. Furthermore, the antagonistic EDF buildings are all a dark blue with bright blue lights on them, making them pop out from the surrounding landscape (unlike their brown uniforms and cars).
- The page picture for the article on Shin Megami Tensei.
- The Color-Coded Multiplayer in Team Fortress 2 may be red vs. blue, but the developers explicitly state that the reason so many of the early maps were set in desert environments was to create a contrast between the warm-colored rocks and dust and the blue sky.
- Meanwhile, Monday Night Combat just goes right ahead and makes its teams orange and blue.
- Counterstrike: Global Offensive uses counterterrorist blue and terrorist orange-yellow as team colors.
- A bit of a different take, since there are two box covers, but with Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, the Black 2 box has blue (to represent electricity) while White 2 has reddish-orange (to represent fire). This also goes with the black and white contrast present in these games and their prequels.
- Asura's Wrath does this a lot. Asura himself is painted and surrounded in orange flames while many of the enemies are advertised in blue backgrounds. The image on the main article and the box art are prime examples of this among others, but it's very well done contrast compared to many others on this list due to fitting the themes of the game.
- Assassin's Creed: Revelations. All of it, although occasionally with a welcome touch of red.
- Enforced in League of Legends: many players with partial red-green color-blindness complained about the default Color-Coded Multiplayer scheme, so an orange-and-blue Color-Blind Mode was added.
- Legacy of Kain, the two protagonists, Kain and Raziel, are color-coded like this. Kain wears a red sash around his chest while Raziel has blue skin, and their checkpoint emblems in Defiance are red and blue-green. Blue and green are the colors of the Spectral Realm, Raziel's native plane of being, while orange and red are the colors of the hell dimension of the Hylden, which for an unexplained reason is where Kain goes when he dies as opposed to the Spectral Realm. There's also Defiance's "neutral" loading screen◊ — the character specific ones of course are orange and blue.
Webcomics
Website
Western Animation
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic gives the orange Applejack and the teal Rainbow Dash a friendly rivalry in-series. While this is mostly a bonus for the toy box art, this has rarely been used due to miscommunication between the animation and toy divisions.
- The Wonderbolts, on top of their yellow and blue outfits, also all come in orange and blue.
- The Amazing World Of Gumball's Gumball and Darwin.
- Hey Arnold uses this in their credits, popping the yellow names of the crew out of the blue backround. And in the Halloween special, it was actually orange.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, the Grand Finale has two determining fights happening in parallel: Aang/Ozai and Azula/Zuko. Both were red, or a kind of orange, versus blue. But in one fight, Blue was good, in the other, blue was evil.
- Jetstorm and Jetfire are like-minded twins.
Real Life
- Blue and Orange is a popular color set for team colors, from schools through the pros and in almost every sport, including auto racing. No need to list your favorites.
- Following the 2011 Canadian federal election, the government was split with the Conservative Party of Canada (blue) in power and the New Democratic Party (orange) forming the Official Opposition. Interestingly the NDP's policies are also largely agreed to be in sharper contrast with the Conservative Party than the previous opposition: the Liberal Party (red).
- Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has orange clouds, but a dark blue atmosphere.
- Sunsets on the blue-colored Earth are colored orange, but sunsets on the orangey-red Mars are colored blue.
- The 1970s◊ and 1980s◊ logos for ITV company LWT had blue and orange stripes.
- The NTSC analog television system's YIQ color space has the orange and blue contrast along the in-phase (I) axis and the green and purple contrast along the quadrature (Q) axis. More bandwidth is allocated to I than to Q because the eye is more sensitive to orange and blue contrast.
- Some forms of colorblindness make it difficult to see red or green (or both). As a result, this can force a person to only see yellow/orange and blue.
- The colour of the sand in some areas of Namib Desert is vivid orange, and the contrast with a clear blue sky is simply stunning. Have a look at Google Images search for the words 'orange blue Namib'.
- The Czech photographer and traveller Jiří Kolbaba took an amazing series of photographs in Namibia, some of which illustrate this trope wonderfully. See one of his gorgeous pictures from a part of the desert called Sossusvlei here◊.
- Technically not allowed in traditional Western European Heraldry, since Orange (called "Tenne") and Blue (called 'Azure') are both classified as 'colors', as opposed to the 'metals' "Or" (gold/yellow) and "Argent" (silver/white), and the rules forbid the use of color on color. Artistic license in the actual colors chosen means that a gold or yellow can be rendered as quite orangey, thereby sneaking past the prohibition.
- The first flag of the Netherlands, the Prinsenvlag, was an orange-white-blue tricolour, as are the flags of New York City and Albany and the former flag of South Africa, all of which were based on the Prinsenvlag due to the important role the Dutch played in those areas.
- Often employed on food packaging to make it stand out, most notably the Scottish drink Irn Bru and the UK snack food Wotsits. To some people in the UK, this colour combination evokes these things regardless of what it's used for.
- On the aforementioned topic of "standing out", boxes of Kraft Dinner have this colour scheme as well.
- As well as road construction signs, as the bright orange contrasts to the sky.
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