If you showed me many of the posters shown here in isolation, and asked me to describe the palette, I would have said "that's a yellow poster": https://stephenfollows.com/i/171004131/orange-the-mvp-of-the... - with some exceptions such as Lorax and Unbelievers that I would have said are orange.
EDIT: I changed from "most of the posters" to "many of the posters" as there are some that feel to me decidedly orange.
One interesting thing is - are these images encoded in the RGB color space or in a color space that allows all the colors human can see. If the latter and the code to analyze assumed RGB there may be things that look more yellow to us that would end up being interpreted as Orange. But that is a long shot.
- do you have all the posters for all movies? Probably not.
- do you have well-preserved examples of those posters? Many are going to be sun- or age- faded.
- do you have good scans of the posters that pre-date digital originals?
and so on.
On a tangent, “more liberal” in this context confounds an insight I had on reading it, that while more words are used to describe the range of colors in the one group, more colors are described by each word in the other. Which is the more conservative?
Raises the question if the author could have or should have included grey in the analyses.
* How the colors were picked and assigned to each category and (e.g. at what point is red pink and no longer red)
* An indication of distribution in charts, they have different scales on the y-axis.
* The author likely sampled posters with mostly the same color above a given threshold for each category, would that (together with the lack of methodology and error bars) heavily skews the reader's presentation of the data analysis?
I feel red/green/black was the most common scheme in the horror I saw as a kid ('70s-'80s), tho perhaps it was purple and not black..
Personally I always associated sickly yellow and greens with horror, but that seems to have been a trend perhaps.
I did wonder about one thing:
> The first measure I tracked was a ‘Colourfulness score’. This measures how intense and varied the colours are in a poster. Higher values mean the image contains more saturated and diverse colours, while lower values indicate a more muted or monochrome palette.
As the description suggests, it seems to me these are actually two things: one is how saturated the colors are and one is how diverse they are. In other words one is how much color there is and one is how many colors there are. The examples given for each color later on are ones where a single color predominates, but it's not clear from the article how common this pattern is.
Personally I'm intrigued by posters that use a wider palette. Subjectively it feels to me that movie posters have moved towards a minimalist design over the past 10-20 years (as have book covers), making single colors more central, but I'm not sure whether that hunch would be borne out by data.
I'm guessing a lot of green and blue.
We went from black-and-white to color to blue-and-orange cinema.
lubujackson•4mo ago
I thought there was a clear smoking gun reason it has become popular but it doesn't seem entirely clear cut. Except that the blue/teal makes orange (and skin) "pop" as the colors are complementary, and color swapping/enhancing has become much easier in recent years. (And I think, somewhat cynically, because both hues are both pretty far from the default green screen color...)
pier25•4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors
dmbche•4mo ago
In real life the cokor of both the sun and sky will strongly affect the color of what you see, meaning you actually see more "teal and orange" at that time, although much less intense than when color graded ( and you're losing light, so you're not used to bright teal and orange).
Unsubstantiated, but I also think your brain feels the manufactured lighting (which is flatteing to the skin) is similar to golden hour, and that then the teal and orange can make it "make sense" more, unconsciously.
joshvm•4mo ago
https://www.theshiznit.co.uk/feature/how-to-design-a-hollywo...