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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Wait...the MARVEL movies are muddy? It's the DCEU movies which are really unpleasant to look at with the general lack of colour, the lens-flares and the scenes which are barely watchable because they are so dark. Sure, they have a nice little artsy arrangement once in a while, mostly consisting of images Snyder has lifted from somewhere and repeated on screen, but those are just moments. When I actually saw colour in the Wonder Woman trailer, I had a small celebration just for that!
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It is cheating if you take one scene which isn't representative for the movie overall at all. BTW, I have watched Got G countless times, and the scene in which Peter and Gamora meet doesn't look that dark at all. That might be the youtube conversation though....
edited 18th Nov '16 10:52:04 PM by Swanpride
The DC movies are dark, sometimes to the point where it's hard to see what's going on, but generally, if anything, they're unnaturally crisp, with a sharpness that looks more like a hyperrealistic video game's box art than a comic book. I actually like Zak Snyder's visuals, but as I've said on the DC threads, I just don't like it for Superman.
Getting back to the video, though— keep in mind, 'muddy' here doesn't just mean 'bad'. Rather it refers to everything being washed out, the colours indistinct from each other— nothing is brighter or darker than anything else, which flattens out the image. That doesn't make the images bad, by any means, and I would say that the action reads very clearly. I think he's right that a superhero movie should pop a little more, though— plenty of realistic movies pop. For instance— Saving Private Ryan has a suitably murky palette but its shadows are deep black. This complaint is only about colour, and all it's saying that this would make some already-good movies even better.
The video's not saying that these movies are too dark, it's saying they're not dark enough...
edited 19th Nov '16 3:25:32 PM by Unsung
No, it doesn't. It talks about the colour grading, but that is not the issue. No matter in which colour you grad it, there won't suddenly turn up new lights or new shadows. It just makes the contrasts more unnatural.
Take Fury Road....Fury Road goes for colourful contrasts, but that is NOT why the movie works so well visually. It works so well because you could have exactly the same image in black and white and it would still work because the lighting is very carefully arranged.
This is a general issue with movies nowadays, btw, the more CGI, the less shadow and light you get to see.
Light and shadow are a part of colour grading, a major part. The video spends like two minutes pointing out how much more vivid the light and shadow could be. It shows clips from Fury Road while it's talking about having true black onscreen. Seriously, the video's not ignoring light and shadow as a subject. Hell, that's what I've been harping on about since my first reply to the video.
edited 19th Nov '16 12:27:13 AM by Unsung
I think one of the major things that turns me off about the DCEU movies is that the color palette, or lack thereof. Everything looks so grey and depressing, and it kind of turns me off.
This especially rankles me because some of my favorite DC stuff is very colorful indeed.
Oh God! Natural light!I saw that video earlier and was debating on posting it here (since I'm not a regular to the thread) but since it's here I'll chime in. It's basically a rebuttal to that nonsensical "What if Man of Steel was in Color" video a while back, which didn't know what it was doing and simply turned up the saturation and in other cases was outright painting the image (the lime green Serengeti). The fact it also made the "original footage" darker to make the altered footage look better didn't help.
The things pointed out in the Marvel movies were largely things I had noticed in some part. The true black values is simply a part of the greater whole. The term dynamic range is mentioned but not really explained, which is related to the image captured by the camera. It's about how in any given calibration how the dark and bright parts of the image can get while still maintaining detail (imagine a dark interior scene but with a window looking into the bright outside). Digital still has a way to go before having the same dynamic range as film stock. An image that has high contrast, deep black and bright whites, is generally what is considered the "cinematic" look. The reason Mad Max Fury Road has popularity as a black and white movie is because of how perfectly it played with light, not color.
Because the Marvel movies don't play with high contrast much the images are generally quite flat. Even the brighter reds like Iron Man's suit and Thor's cape are rather uniform in color all around, red and a darker shade of red instead of bright red for the highlight and black for the shadow. So it certainly uses some bright colors but the color itself doesn't really pop out.
From what I've read on color theory in art the best metric of how good your film or image looks is to first view it in grayscale and make sure the tones are right before adding in the color, and that trying to use two colors of different hue but similar saturation and brightness is suboptimal and leads to flatness, as they'll both look the same after grayscaling.
Meanwhile the opposite where you achieve shading and gradation via a continuum of colors of the same hue and saturation, looks great on the grayscale, but dull and lifeless in color, so you need to ramp up the saturation or change the hue for shaded areas (for example a red cape having additional purple and blue hues in the shadows, and oranges in areas of high saturation).
It seems like the movies have more of the former problem where there's a lot of hues going on, but because of the lack of diversity in saturation and black-white contrast it makes the image flat for all the colors that may be present.
edited 19th Nov '16 3:23:41 PM by AlleyOop
I find the pure black discussion in the video really interesting, because in animation (traditional, at least, I don't know as much about computer animation), you're taught not to use pure black, because it looks like a hole in the screen. Part of that is probably the use of simpler shapes, though.
I agree that this is all very subjective. I like the corrected Civil War footage, but I'm ambivalent about the Go TG one, and I think that the clips he shows from the film shot movies have a blue and orange problem. I'm not much of a fan of the colour scripting in the DC movies, either. I didn't really notice anything muddy about the Marvel films while watching, with the exception of Age of Ultron (which is... not great, colour wise).
Part of what I dislike about the final battle is all the gray and brown is really ugly to look at and kinda strains the eye at times.
I generally find the Cinema Sins guy to be a nitpicky wanker, but I admit I did laugh and agree when he made a joke to the effect of "Yay! Another gray character joining the fight against a bunch of other gray characters! This'll be easy for my eyes to follow!"
Truth is I've never been hugely impressed with Whedon's direction. He has an ear for dialogue but his eye for visuals is often lacking. His efforts to have a couple of really fancy shots only serves to show how dry the image is normally. The Hard-Work Montage in AOU (trying to create Ultron) felt like a completely different movie.
A related issue to the coloring is the reliance on deep field focus, most of the image is crystal clear. That is kind of mandatory with wide establishing shots and when there is a big group shot, but even in most medium shots and close-ups you can see a lot of detail.
Whedon has a weakness, but it is not colour, it is the way he arranges a scene...to be precise, there is rarely a lot of movement in the talking scenes. Which sounds like an odd complain, but you can express a lot through a specific camera angle, how you use space in a shot and how people (and things) move. But that is a specific Whedon criticism, not a MCU problem. James Gun does this very masterfully for example, he loves it to work with details in the background, and Derrickson often picks interesting camera angles.
Honestly, for this reason alone I always felt that the "they all look the same" statement doesn't really hold up.
Minutia of shot selection, camera movement, editing and color grading are pretty much invisible to the layman. Even then it's nearly impossible to show what the director does with screenshots, because we are talking a hundred different elements, a hundred different decisions, combining together. Most movies have the basics of framing and practical lighting down, so to show what one director would do versus another is difficult without making it into an extensive essay.
I'm not an expert on film visuals but this is consistent with my artistic education as far as painting goes. I'm sure it applies to film as well since it's all visual art in the end.
This is why you're taught to paint with grayscale at first because it's much easier to see how lights and darks make an image "pop". If you don't have enough contrast between the two your image looks flat and boring.
edited 20th Nov '16 7:55:32 PM by Draghinazzo
A picture really is worth a thousand words, and a movie done right is thousands of pictures, so most of the same criticism that applies in painting and photography does apply. Every Frame A Painting, as the man says.
He could be a handsome Innsmouthian
Is that the one where there were half fish people?
Forever liveblogging the Avengers
Well his sheer power combined with the atmospheric pressure-distorting phenomena that occurs around him what makes him cross the line into Humanoid Abomination. His fellow Atlanteans however are more like classic Deep Ones with blue skin and runic markings (like Namorita, but fishier and creepier). And of course MCU's Atlantis is more like R'lyeh than something out of The Little Mermaid.
edited 21st Nov '16 9:12:44 AM by nervmeister
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Follow that up with a lustful Psychotic Smirk , and you've just ruined the childhoods of 98 percent of the audience.

I agree that it's too much, but still— if that takes 10 minutes, a billion-dollar studio can afford to take the time, hire someone to tweak these values and find some kind of middle ground.