Distribution of colors in movie posters between 1914 and 2012

http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/new_page.html

by fallenhitokiri • 14 years ago

244 84 14 years ago

vijayp.ca

fritzvd• 14 years ago

Wasn't this here before? It's still cool though :)

fallenhitokiri2• 14 years ago

I am not sure, I did not know it and just found it on a blog and I did not see any timestamp

carpo• 14 years ago

I thought that too, but then after reading it I remembered a previous post about the distribution of colours within actual movies, not movie posters. So perhaps that is what you remember too?

ekianjo• 14 years ago

More red/yellow before, more blue/violet in recent history. Cool data set, but the question is "so what?".

gradstudent• 14 years ago

Well, it's interesting to see that Teal and Orange filters are used just as prominently in promotional material as in the films themselves. It's a terrible trend and annoying as hell. See here for more:

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/teal-and-orange...

kitsune_• 14 years ago

That was a very interesting link, thanks a lot.

shimfish• 14 years ago

I was looking out for the Teal/Orange effect and was interested to see that it started in posters way back in the 80s already, 20 years before digital film color grading.

thaumaturgy• 14 years ago

Huh. I'm fairly color-blind, so I can't see the orange (or teal) tones that he's complaining about. However, I have noticed that more films lately seem to have more detail, and everything just "looks better" to me.

I've read that some amount of color-blindness is context sensitive (e.g. http://www.designmatrix.com/pl/cyberpl/cic.html); I bet that the increased contrast in these films is part of what's making them so much more visually appealing to me.

fallenhitokiri2• 14 years ago

I'd be interested seeing someone (not fit enough in this topics to do it myself) applying color psychology and mapping it to the years / events / industry.

Could explain the shift from warmer colors to more technical ones (just speculating)

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

Maybe they couldn't use some colors in older times due to technological limitations of chemical/print process?

jayfuerstenberg• 14 years ago

Looks like "Peak Oil" back in 1977 made people feel blue or resulted in different chemicals being used in films. The blue band is much wider for that year all of a sudden.

yesbabyyes• 14 years ago

Or it was Star Wars. ;-)

yread• 14 years ago

Interesting that there are no black columns ie no colors which consistently wouldn't be used. Green is represented very little though

NanoWar• 14 years ago

I wonder what happened in 1921. It was out of control!

MengYuanLong• 14 years ago

The most interesting part of 1921 is that the original(?) Brewster's Millions was released. In the original movie, the protagonist had to spend $2mil in a year and remain unmarried to inherit the full $10mil. By 1985, the remake dropped the marriage requirement (honestly, being a single rich guy in the 1980s wasn't too bad) and upped the spending requirement to $30 mil in 30 days to inherit $300 mil.

My, how times change. I wonder what Montgomery Brewster will have to do in 2049 to earn his inheritance.

ColinWright• 14 years ago

In the associated blog post he says:

  Methodology:
  I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images
  (yay wget -- “The Social Network” inspired
  me to not use curl)

Could some who's seen the film enlighten me on why wget is better than curl?

Thanks.

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

I don't remember any discussion of wget vs. curl in the movie and couldn't find anything specific to the movie about that on Google; I'm guessing that the the OP just decided to use wget instead of curl because that was what they were using in the movie. (If I'm wrong, somebody please correct me.)

Here is a comparison of wget and curl that was posted on Hacker News a little over two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241479

mcpherrinm• 14 years ago

I think this is mostly one line in which Mark Zuckerberg says something along the lines of "time for a little wget magic". Certainly not a major plot point.

Here's what I think is the relevant scene on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOzMz-fOOw

VMG• 14 years ago

Wow, I was surprised on how realistic that was. Maybe I should watch the movie after all.

SoftwareMaven4• 14 years ago

HTTPie[1] is better than both. ;)

1. https://github.com/jkbr/httpie

(I am in no way affiliated with this project. I'm just a happy user.)

akx• 14 years ago

But wget and curl aren't for humans, whereas HTTPie is. I've done plenty of `wget -m -np`s (and `puf -r` when I've had to saturate my Internet pipe...) which isn't what HTTPie does.

harbud• 14 years ago

Ok, httpie is prettier and has some syntax shortcuts, but it doesn't even do a fraction of what curl or wget does. No recursive downloads, no simulating diferent HTTP protocol version, no SSL options, no even retry options! #fail

(I am in no way an httpie hater.)

alister2• 14 years ago

I am awe-struck with what people with a passion manage to get done "in a couple weeks" just for fun.

I can't imagine that I could have hired someone to do the same analysis, research, programming, scripting, graphics creation, and web site layout for anything less than tens of thousands of dollars. (Or is my intuition wrong about that?)

StavrosK3• 14 years ago

Well, a week is about $2500, so I guess it'd take around $5k.

noahc3• 14 years ago

There are many people who would call $2500 their two day rate. So, $10k+ doesn't seem that far fetched for a project of this complexity that delivers business value of some sort.

styts• 14 years ago

Nowhere does he say that he spent all of the 2 weeks working on this entirely. My guess would be that he did a 2-day sprint to hack the prototype and a bit more to polish it across the 2 weeks. Point is - he would not bill 2 working weeks were it a contracting gig. But then again, where'd you get such a motivated contractor (cf. working on own project)?

alister2• 14 years ago

If he did it in a 2-day sprint, that makes it even more amazing -- which was my point. It seems unlikely to me that I could find someone to do the same quality of work as a contracting gig (whether it took 2 days or 2 months) and charge less than tens of thousands of dollars.

JacobIrwin• 14 years ago

I'm curious about the distribution of ink costs (by color) during the same timespan - just how close that correlation is.

shiftb• 14 years ago

This is the question I was going to ask. I've heard that the reason most superheroe's costumes are primary colors is because it was less expensive to print them for the comics. I wonder if a similar effect is happening here?

jszmajda• 14 years ago

+1, I think this must've played a large role in color selection, especially considering the large print runs these posters had to have.

haddr• 14 years ago

but hey, isn't there any color corruption during scanning/digitalisation of those posters?

jeffool• 14 years ago

I find the near constant use of red interesting. Given all we've been told of red and marketing (think cereal boxes), I figured it would grown.

mbq• 14 years ago

But why a stacked barplot? This way you can easily see the dynamics in reds but the apparent amount of blue is quite deceiving. IMO a better idea is fixed hue grid and modulated saturation for the counts.

gulbrandr• 14 years ago

Shows an entire movie in a single image.

vijayr• 14 years ago

Can anyone explain how this works?

FelipeCortez• 14 years ago

I don't know for sure, but judging from the sequence shots, looks like it scans a pixel column depending corresponding to the part of the movie. If it's scanning a frame halfway of the movie, it will scan the pixel column in the middle of the frame.

kator2• 14 years ago

Looks like Star Wars posters messed up 1977!?

http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977

kator2• 14 years ago

Hmm again in 1980:

http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1980

Maybe Lucas really was a visionary!

damian2000• 14 years ago

Before clicking I thought it was Jaws, but wrong year.

five_star• 14 years ago

Cool! Color combinations form sinusoid throughout the history.

hammerbrostime• 14 years ago

Interesting to watch the color gamut open up as color printing technologies improve over time. Blue/Cyan is the hardest pigment to work with, and you can see the blue-range grow over time as the technology to support it improves.

patrickk• 14 years ago

I would say the color gamut has narrowed recently.

Really good blog post on Hollywood going mad with teal and orange: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.ie/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hol...

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

There's plenty of blue in 1919-21, but it disappears for the following decades. Either the data is seriously biased or something happened here.

ZacharyPitts• 14 years ago

I immediately starting scanning the colors to see if this blog post from a couple of years ago was vindicated about all movies being teal and orange:

http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...

It is.

jmaygarden• 14 years ago

It definitely does seam to go teal heavy from the 80's onward.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

I don't think "vindicated" is quite the word - as far as I know, the author hasn't taken any significant flak for it, nor have I heard much about it beyond "Huh, yeah, they do look like that now." I would just go with "this analysis is in agreement with this other one."

aw3c22• 14 years ago

While beautiful, only a seriously limited amount of movies was analysed for this and the selection seems weird. The year 2000 for example only has 48 movies in this. I am not sure you can interpret anything from it.

larrys• 14 years ago

Agree.

I'm surprised at the amount of comments here that reflect this data as if it's gospel and whether it's fair to interpret anything from it at all. We can't even vet and recreate the methodology of, as you said "limited movies", and see if it's correct for what it does say.

Not to mention the fact that prior to 1929 there is not more than 9 posters of data being analyzed.

Printing has changed also. Number of color, type of press, computerization all would contribute to difference in what designers would do (the analysis did mention this) but as mentioned the data was limited.

bane• 14 years ago

The eventual settling on teal and orange is interesting. I'm curious what the feedback loop was that told the marketing department "this is what will make more money". It seems such a subtle thing, and I would think red (as an alarming color) or green (as the color we see best) would end up figuring more prominently.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

I take it you have not seen this yet (linked elsewhere in the thread, but it's been on HN a few times): http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...

SoftwareMaven4• 14 years ago

I'm sure you've seen this[1] before, but the answer is probably more of a feedback loop. The big-money movies could afford to do more color alterations that caused movies to appear to "pop", getting audiences used to those colors, forcing less-expensive movies to do the same as the technology to do so became cheaper.

1. http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...

splicer• 14 years ago

I don't see The Matrix. I wonder if it was left out because it's on outlier (too green/yellow).

vernon• 14 years ago

Fascinating viewing. Wonder what changed us from being all sunshine and light to being all doom and gloom. I blame the Dark Knight.

jdavid• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to combine this information with boxofficemojo and adjust the distribution of colors based on box office revenue assuming that box office revenue correlates to mindshare, you would have a closer map to what people 'thought' a movie poster would look like in that year.

presidentender• 14 years ago

What happened in 1977?

danbee• 14 years ago

Star Wars?

Ogre• 14 years ago

And Close Encounters, and Saturday Night Fever, which both have blue-ish posters here: http://www.imdb.com/list/_EcfN1DMzJQ/

Also The Deep, which isn't on that list but did pretty well so likely had a lot of posters. All of which would be mostly ocean. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075925/

squarecat2• 14 years ago

Wait, so they all fall on the visible spectrum?

squarecat2• 14 years ago

OK, so who's going to do the correlation with en vogue colors from the same years (fashion, paint, cars, etc.)?

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

Ha, you can see the teal trend getting stronger in the 2000s. I wonder why the colorfulness of 1919-1921 was so quickly reverted?

Aloha• 14 years ago

I wonder how much this adjusts for natural fading in prints.

Erifcit• 14 years ago

If they were scanned in recently, doesn't this just prove that print materials do indeed yellow over time?

Distribution of colors in movie posters between 1914 and 2012

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