Comment by zuInnp
2 days ago
For me, it is very apparent in movies nowadays.
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
Wild. Because that is one of the first, most heavily color graded films I can recall. Theoden's coming out from under the spell of Saruman is the most hit-you-ver-the-head use of color-grading that I can think of. (And, perhaps in a fantasy film it's fine.)
Last night I watched Erin Brokovitch (2000) and it was like looking at film that had been partially sepia-processed with the heavy handedness of the grading.
The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.
The Matrix also had a technical reason/glitch that pushed them earlier in the process to pursue the narrative reason. (Per some of the commentary, the early effects work they were doing, such as processing the first versions of "bullet time", were very susceptible to green/blue screen leakage so they leaned into that, and used it to decide which shots should use green or blue screens and let that leakage drive other parts of the color grading, including introduce "fake" color leaks onto set work that didn't use chroma keying [green/blue screens].)
And for a brief moment I stopped to think about whether we're looking at a horrible middle earth hallmark movie or just some 'clever' parody.