Read on Twitter
I’m a working colourist in the industry, and a lot of people replying to this either don’t understand the issue or are wilfully ignorant, so I’m going to break down why this grading is bad and why it’s so common; https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/1259174715115134981
There’s 3 techniques used in this style to make the Middle East look Alien. First, in real life, light warms. When you look at images, the darker parts of an image are naturally colder in terms of colour temperature. You’re so used to this that you don’t even realise it.
This kind of green light is extremely rare in the natural world, and can make you unsettled, especially when the warm green-yellow is applied to the shadows. This is reinforced by usually lowering the contrast, making it look bright even in the shade.
The reason you’d colour something like this is to make it look ‘wrong’. It’s the reason the Office in the Matrix is green. Unlike The Matrix, however, these grades often go further than just a single scene tint.
In these bad-middle-east-grades, it’s more than just a slight tint to a neutral image, it’s everything. The worst offenders are the sky and human skin, both things they look deeply wrong when tinted yellow-green. JoJo does this to unsettle you too, but in a less racist way.
The combination of all this is to make a location feel not just foreign, but gross. The specific colour chosen is what l you’d see in nature on dying greenery, polluted water and dead flesh. It’s lazy, overdone, and is a way to separate the audience from the other.
Strangely enough, footage of america doesn’t get this treatment. If you left the footage alone, it would look a lot like America, and they don’t want the audience remembering this location as full of real people.
Some people are saying that this colouring helps make the action easier to read, which is untrue - if you want readability, you want contrasting colours: Red vs blue, White-hat vs Black hat. This grading style has no visual contrast.
Some people replying that this is the same as ‘orange-cyan’ colour grading. There are three major differences. First, the colours aren’t tinted monochrome - the sky is allowed to be blue and skin is allowed to be flesh coloured.
Secondly, the contrast isn’t completely shot; dark parts are black rather than light yellow, and the sky is allowed to be bright rather than dark yellow. Again, this helps us place ourselves in the scene, and gives us a sense of the geography.
Finally, orange-cyan generally looks pleasing! It may be cliché, but it works, and gets the job done if you’re not looking for anything revolutionary.
This is basic colour theory to a lot of people, but I keep seeing people defend this colour grading as anything other than to make the Middle East look bad, and I can’t help myself.
