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The Color Grading Pallet of Recent 007 Movies
In most shots you see, NTTD uses a Da Vinck form of LUT in which people's faces look like fried chicken. The color teal is in almost every shot of the film. Light blue was everywhere in that film.
SP uses a sepia tone throughout with an orangish brown hue whether to show warm colors to go along with warm climates. But in some shots such as the PTS, it feels like dirt is in the air. But the Moroccan desert scenes just look beautiful like art coming to life. Hoyt is a very underrated cinematographer.
SF uses Grey/Blue and orange scale, a form of Da Vinci in all of its scenes.
Quantum of Solace had a lot of sepia style tones in the first third, black and white kn the second third, and orange and brown in the last third all the way up to Kazan before a black and white tonality which had an orange glow color grade when the movie finished with Bond and M in the snow. I heard that the mood on the set was almost as serious as the movie which is why an air of melancholy can be felt throughout the movie, giving it an extra boost to convey the pain of Vesper's absence caused by her death. According to the DVD featurette, one of the brighter moments in all of the filming was the sequence shot in Panama where an empty abandoned building had been given new life again by the crew to shoot the scene at Greene Planet's party with Dominic Greene. But that was all as far as any uplifting vibe went.
SP uses a sepia tone throughout with an orangish brown hue whether to show warm colors to go along with warm climates. But in some shots such as the PTS, it feels like dirt is in the air. But the Moroccan desert scenes just look beautiful like art coming to life. Hoyt is a very underrated cinematographer.
SF uses Grey/Blue and orange scale, a form of Da Vinci in all of its scenes.
Quantum of Solace had a lot of sepia style tones in the first third, black and white kn the second third, and orange and brown in the last third all the way up to Kazan before a black and white tonality which had an orange glow color grade when the movie finished with Bond and M in the snow. I heard that the mood on the set was almost as serious as the movie which is why an air of melancholy can be felt throughout the movie, giving it an extra boost to convey the pain of Vesper's absence caused by her death. According to the DVD featurette, one of the brighter moments in all of the filming was the sequence shot in Panama where an empty abandoned building had been given new life again by the crew to shoot the scene at Greene Planet's party with Dominic Greene. But that was all as far as any uplifting vibe went.
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Comments
Fecal snow is another method of color grading them.....and yes, green all over the last thirds of CR.....maybe they were metaphorically trying to pay tribute to the unforgettable Eva Green or foreshadowing Dominic Greene.
Definitely a wonder....they were obviously trying hard to make a classic in the modern era...everything from the editing, cinematography to the music (David Arnold matured a lot between DAD and CR, he really didn't deserve to be laid off from SF imho)....they rightfully made CR into the anti-DAD which was filled with icy-blue but not in a metaphorical way. Martin Campbell, while he does have his own tropes such as zooming in on alarms at facilities in his movies etc.....has his way of storytelling. One good repetitive feature is when he closes in on the eyes of the main character as they awake from being knocked unconscious somehow.
Metaphors speak volumes in the making of the Bond movies, and it's usually the subtyle ones that make the better impacts....for example, the snow in Kazan between Bond and M was meant to symbolize Bond being in a very cold world that he has come to accept and move on through, while understanding the significance of nurturing the relationship with his most loyal woman, M. Aside from her, he really had no one....as a friend like Felix was overseas for his job.
Spectre is awful. Just awful. They should regrade the entire thing it’s a desaturated yellow piss stained mess colour wide
There's another way that the producers could legitimately monetize more money from their old properties....by releasing a colour-corrected version of Spectre with extra footage or behind the scenes including an additional interview with the stars of the film like DC, and a promotional watch-along Livestream with him.
These kinds of longer re-releases will help keep the studios like Amazon happy without Jeff Bezos trying to send Bond into space or meddling too much with the producer's creative control. It will keep the fans happy and Bezofeld at bay.
QOS has the most balanced color palette of the Craig Bonds, with no focus on any particular color, but the colors seen are typically muted. Visually it's my favorite Craig film by far.
SF has the typical 2010's teal-and-orange look. There are no other dominant colors, it just vacillates between these two.
Turkey: orange
London: teal
Shanghai: teal
Macau: orange
Scotland: teal, then orange when Skyfall is burning
SP: Awful. Just, awful. Murky, low-contrast photography dominated by muddy colors, typically yellows and browns with some teal thrown in. Snowy areas in daytime look like early evening. Ridiculous. A hideous movie. Then again, I'm biased against Hoytema, I simply do not like his cinematography. Wally Pfister was sorely missed in Interstellar.
Yes, it was a good contrast to the way Brosnan's movies were thoughtlessly made. Often times by the middle of the movie in TWINE or DAD, it would feel like the director was giving audiences a middle finger and the cash grab was obvious. The music of David Arnold was always great but either dismissed or it had to match the silliness of the whole one man save the world predictability.
I don't know if "thoughtlessly" is the right phrase. Meheux shot GoldenEye wonderfully, TND is very sleek and shiney in keeping with its techno-vibes, and DAD is also very much of its time. TWINE doesn't really achieve much - it's a very flat looking film unfortunately.
It's as much to do with contemporary trends as it is with the level of thought, if that makes sense.
I think the general public just pay more attention to cinematography now more than they ever did.
I quite liked NTTD's color palette. It had a richness and brightness that reminds me of classic three strip Technicolor.
SPECTRE's sepia tone colors have grown on me and I don't mind it so much.
I kind of miss a natural cinematic look, though. Pretty much everything has a digital graded look these days and it often draws attention to itself, thus taking focus away from the story for me.
Skyfall of course is beautiful though.
Speaking of SF, the Scottish Highlands scene was beautiful, but here is a common trope of Sam Mendes in all of his films....he will purposefully chop up a scene. When Bond and M arrive at Skyfall manor, you notice an outside shot of the residence with a choppy continuation. He does the same exact thing in the bath of rose pedals during American Beauty where the character is reaching in the tub. There is discontinuation in the editing vs cinematography aspect....
Yes, I loved the naturalness of it. Rich reds.
Yeah! Rich reds. Like the flames of the scene in the hotel where Bond is about to shoot Camille.
I was wondering the same thing....NTTD was shot on digital, much like SF which loses a lot of charm for visual quality...at least in QR and SP you got to FEEL the presence of the dessert locations in their initial set up scenes. Remember how the camera would pan out and let audiences absorb the environment?
Matera was fake looking and the Safin layer shots looked like a some kind of TikTok style background at times.
NTTD was shot on a combination of Kodak 35mm and 65mm IMAX film formats, but obviously went through a number of digital intermediaries which might account for the oversaturation. Modern film stocks also have to be able to handle digital effects and enhancements which often leaves it looking almost indistinguishable from digital.
I see. But when Francis Ford Coppola mentioned that NTTD and Dune look alike....I know he was talking about the action which was just shoved in these movies like the NTTD one-liners but I also thought about fried chicken skin on the characters.
I think a black and white classic set Bond movie would be more welcome than one that tries to look like a comic book.
I don’t know if it’s the cinematography or the make up,but Camille looks like she’s been spray painted Kia Ora orange in that film.
Agreed! They tried making a movie that has too much action and a punched up script. There were things that the makers just shoved inside that felt out of places including the color grading.
Daniel Craig is a modern classic style actor. Since the beginning of his 007 tenure, he reminded the producers of Steve McQueen.
French cinema has been known to revolutionize many popular aspect of filmmaking. I watched a film called Shoot the Piano Player! I can see Daniel Craig's style being present in that film with the main character and the whole story in the film. I think the production took too much liberty in trying to make a modern classic by copying not the essence in tribute rather through IMITATION (which is offensive and cheesy and not tributary). They were onto something from CR to QoS but lost that originality (Quantum) by chasing what's been done before (Spectre) as well.