- [Hass] Hello, wonderful nerds.
I'm Hass, and while Scott's away,
I thought I'd take over an episode
and talk a little bit about Spiderman Homecoming.
If you know anything about me
from my Strip Panel Naked channel
or Panel by Panel magazine,
or from Comicana episodes from NerdSync itself,
you know I love taking a look at how stories are told
through their visuals, and Spiderman Homecoming had
a really interesting take
on a traditional big blockbuster look for me.
There's been a lot of talk about how Marvel movies
all end up looking the same,
and actually, you do find that a lot
with big blockbuster movies generally,
but Homecoming does do a couple of nice tricks
that you can also find in early Spiderman comics
to give it a bit of an extra added drama,
so that's what we're gonna dive into this time.
Okay, so set the scene, it's worth talking about
the so-called orange and teal effect in movies.
If you've ever seen, more or less,
any big film made in the past 10 years or so,
you'll have some idea of what the orange and teal effect is.
It started to rise in popularity
after the Cohen Brothers' film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou,
which was the first to digitally treat the entire image
throughout the whole film,
and filmmakers then realized that they had this amazing tool
to manipulate the color of their work after the fact.
It's kind of almost like using Photoshop,
but for an entire film,
and it used to be that you'd have to do this all on set.
You'd use filters over the lenses
with very clever lighting,
but with digital shooting
and a more robust digital post production,
there was this new flexibility that people found they had,
and what did they decide to do with that flexibility?
They decided to make everything two colors.
Non-blockbuster filmmakers and studios
pretty much all decided to do that same thing,
which was orange and teal,
though I am generalizing a little bit,
but the reasoning is sound,
if maybe a little boring, honestly.
So, the most common color in the human skin is orange,
and a lot of lights used in films to light the actors
is a kind of golden orange,
but if you then pull out the orange,
you need to find another color to go with it
that works visually, that's gonna be pleasing to the eye
and not look a bit off-kilter,
and if you look at a color wheel,
which is a good way to find out,
opposite orange, you find blue,
so then they would pull up the orange of the skin.
They'd also turn the background into a blue cast.
If you look at the Transformers movies
or the Fast and the Furious franchise,
and even here in Spiderman Homecoming,
orange and teal is absolutely everywhere.
It's in every scene,
in practically every single shot of that film.
Even Peter opening his locker is orange and teal,
and once you see that,
it's kind of hard to unsee it,
and you realize just how much it's invaded popular cinema,
but the thing is, it's really, really satisfying.
I mean, not if you watch five films in a row,
but as one offs, it is actually quite pleasing to the eye.
It actually does look nice,
because in basic color theory, you have two ways
of finding colors that work together.
Either you choose colors that are next to each other
on the color wheel, so orange and red,
or you choose colors that are opposite each other
on the color wheel, like orange and blue, orange and teal,
and you know they'll work together,
and they'll look satisfying to an audience.
That's just how the colors work.
It's some kind of mad science
that I don't know how to explain,
but it does remove any character from the image
when you start to make it all look the same
as everything else that's out there.
You can see the advantage in that it's not gonna be
off-putting to anyone, but it does make everything
look a bit bland and repetitive.
Okay, Hass, let's talk about Spiderman.
I can hear you.
Okay, okay, we're getting there.
So, there's a notable exception
to everything being orange and teal,
and it's in Spiderman's red suit,
which is actually really, really saturated in the film.
It pops in so many scenes,
and actually, on numerous occasions, the background ends up
getting washed out to allow Spiderman to pop even more.
You can see how, in post production,
the red has been bumped up a lot
in the scenes with that suit.
There's actually a moment where Spidey crashes
through a backyard party,
and he slam into the water of the pool
and the water goes everywhere,
but in that scene, in that shot,
you can see the red trunks of people and red cups,
and you can see that they're also
really, really bright and really saturated,
and that gives you an idea that they just boosted the reds
in post-production, but apart from one or two moments,
and they really, really are only one or two moments,
Spiderman's suit is the only red thing in the scene.
It's allowed to stand alone.
It helps give the sense that this is somewhat extraordinary.
This is a color we don't really get to see
anywhere else in the world,
but it also ties in back nicely to his comic book origins.
Back in the days of the big, bright, bulby colors
of the CMYK printing press,
before it was really refined,
you had those big, bright colors.
It's why you see odd things with odd colors
back in the early superhero books,
but back then, they really took advantage of it.
But compared to the world around
of the people actually buying those comics,
of course they looked brighter,
they looked bolder, whereas the world may have
looked drab in comparison.
That was the point.
They were larger than life superheroes,
and that is one way that Homecoming tries to stand alone.
It takes the preconceived orange and teal effect
and it throws in something unexpected
in the form of this saturated red suit,
and I mentioned the color wheel earlier,
and how you look for opposite colors to find things
that work together well,
and if we take red and jump across the wheel,
we end up with green,
and without getting too much into it,
you see this all throughout Spiderman's villains
from the comic books.
So many of them are green.
Vulture, originally from the comics, had a green suit.
You got the Green Goblin, Lizard, Mysterio,
even Sandman had a green shirt.
Those colors work together,
but there's a nice subtle touch that they are
diametrically opposite on the color wheel,
which speaks nicely also to their natures
in the story, too.
So, in Homecoming, we get another color
out of the orange and teal register,
and of course, as I've just said, it is green.
The Vulture has his scary green eyes,
and that is way out of the boundaries
of the orange and teal effect.
When you see the Vulture in the sky
and his green eyes floating, it really pops in this film.
There's also a lovely moment later in the film
I've just gotta mention, where Vulture's out of costume,
and he finds out a bit of key information
while he's sat in a car, and he's sat at a stoplight,
and almost like a light bulb, the stoplight pops
and changes to green, then casts directly onto his face
when he realizes, symbolizing that link
to green as the Vulture, to green as evil and bad.
It's a smart visual decision enforced throughout the film.
By limiting the palette so drastically
for everything else to just that orange and teal,
they've really made the moments with Vulture and Spiderman
in costume stand out so much,
and you can argue that there's a clever reasoning
behind that, to emulate the idea of superheroics
in the ordinary world,
and there's one other final color that does this.
The purple of the alien technology in the film.
Again, it's a new color,
in a world where nothing else we see is purple.
It glows through material in the film.
We see a purple explosion.
We see purple gusts of smoke from the weapons being used,
and it does look otherworldly.
It looks fantastical.
It looks different, and that's the strength
that a lot of blockbusters,
when adopting the orange and teal effect,
haven't taken advantage of,
because if I only show you two colors for an entire story,
but then suddenly I throw in a very bright,
very bold, very deep red, it's gonna stand out to you.
It's gonna make itself known.
Variety is the spice of life and all that.
And by constraining the visuals to allow a couple of moments
to really, really pop, it gives life to the magical
and fantastical elements of Spiderman Homecoming
in a clever, clever way.
Next time anyone bemoans the boring use of drab colors
in a blockbuster, point them to Spiderman Homecoming's
embracing and adapting of it.
Thanks for watching, and thanks for having me on
as a guest host this week on NerdSync.
If you wanna hear more from me every week,
I take a dive into visual storytelling in comic books
at my channel, Strip Panel Naked.
Here's an episode about Spiderman's first comic appearance
for you to take a look at.
For more analytical looks and writing,
I've got a new magazine called Panel by Panel,
and you can find that at PanelXPanel.com.
You can also find them on Twitter for more comics talk
and analysis at HassanOE.
Until next time, nerds.