This isn't as big of a thing as it was maybe a year ago or so when this was something people were saying all the time, but there was this thing Redditors and others would call racist that shows like Breaking Bad and movies would have scenes shot in Mexico be orange looking.
That's racist, Mexico isn't orange!
I know I'm preaching to the choir here from the aspect of Redditors seeing racism everywhere, but I just wanted to bring up some points they don't ever bring up, that is many locations use certain coloring to establish their location subconsciously to viewers, that never get called racist for obvious reasons.
If you watch Hard Target with Jean Claude Van Damme, it's got an orangish tint to the daylight scenes....because it's set in New Orleans, aka the South. In fact, most movies that are set in the south have some sort of warmer tint to their coloring because the mind associates warm weather and warm colors. Filming New Orleans with a cool color tint would feel wrong to our brains.
If you watch the original X-Men movie, the scene with the girl nearly killing the guy by kissing him, it's in the south and it's orangish in color grading, but then later when wolverine is in Canada outside, the whole screen is practically blue it's tinted so hard in the blue direction....because blue is cold and Canada is cold.
Where are all the people outraged saying "Canada isn't blue!!!"
And yet, oftentimes when you have a show or movie that spans many places, if they go to somewhere like Canada or Alaska, they'll choose a colder color tint to emphasize the location change.
Same thing with Europe. If it's Italy or Spain, it'll probably have a bit of a orangish bright tint, but if it's Germany, it'll probably be a little bit greyish, slightly desaturated. Seriously, so many movies when they get to some non-mediteranean European city, things get a greyish look.
"GERMANY DOESN'T LOOK GREY, THAT'S RACIST REEE!"
Now does modern film over use color grading? Absolutely! But that's an entirely different argument. If The Thing by John Carpenter were shot today, the white snow would look blue because they think the audience is too stupid to know that Antartica is cold unless it's tinted in a cold way.
I hate the modern overuse of color grading in films, but again, that's an entirely different issue (and as I pointed out with Hard Target, it's not exclusive to modern film....film has always chosen certain color palletes for certain locations and in moderation and with correct artistic application it's fine, it's just that modern films overuse digital color gradings to an unnatural looking degree).
The point is, if the Redditors want to complain about overuse of unnatural color grading as being racist, why didn't they complain that every location on earth gets a "look" applied to it, like the greyish Europe, the warmish south, the cold looking Canada, etc.
Oh right because that breaks the narrative.
So really they should either complain about all the post process coloring assuming audiences are stupid and there's no aspect of it that's racist, or they should complain about none of it.
Sorry just had to rant, because I saw an example of a comment saying that, about one of the Craig bond films shooting Mexico orangish and "Mexico just looks orange didn't you know hur durr", and I had to make this rant.
Good rant and I agree that modern filmmaking is almost entirely wrong. Completely defeats the purpose of capturing a beautiful moving image.
That said, after reading the title, I fully expected the body of this post to be "yes it does, you dumb shit!"
I remember when Battlefield 3 insisted on a desaturated blue tint on everything, even on Middle Eastern and tropical maps, because of "artistic integrity". All it did was hurt your eyes and made everything hard to tell apart.
I suppose it's not a coincidence that the most colorful games, BFV and 2042, are also the most cartoonish and woke entries in the series.
And Fallout 3 is notorious for it's green colors everywhere. It's a shame that companies don't make good games with the great graphics we have now, but just make woke trash.
it's more pathetic than that.
Germany is proudly gray. No opinions that will get us in trouble and everything works on time and on budget.
Seattle wonders why San francisco keeps moving into their proudly gray area.
You're totally right. I have noticed similar complaints about tropes, usually from novice writers or critics who are obsessed with 'originality'. Tropes can definitely be overused in storytelling, but people forget that the purpose of a trope or stock character is to establish something quickly in the audience's mind without having to spend a lot of time explaining it.
The same is true of directors and colour grading--we are in Mexico now because it's dusty and orange, and flamenco guitar is playing.
Can you do this in a more subtle way? Absolutely, if that's what the story calls for.
The thing is that you can have a dusty orange color look without it having to be done as a filter if they designed the sets properly and avoid shots that show too much sky.
It's the difference of a solid archetypical story which follows tropes because they fit the narrative that is being told versus a messy story full of poorly implemented tropes that seem like they were put there because the writer had seen these beats be well liked in other media.
I'm on both sides of the fence, on one hand excessive color grading is fucking annoying, but on the other hand Mexico DOES have a lot of orangish brown especially in the more deserty parts that are more commonly depicted, the walls, the dirt, the food and the people are all an orangish brown.
White nations used to on average have a naturally cooler color pallet due to racial demographics, however due to (((diversity))) that cool coloration now has to be artificially added which then instills the mentality that artificial gradients are the only way of having the color pallet that's desired.
It really is impressive how many problems all can be traced back to the same root...