Kubrick posters by Tomer Hanuka

I'm a huge fan of Tomer Hanuka's art, and several of his prints hang in my apartment. The ones that don't are the ones that sold out before I could get my hands on one of them, much to my grief.

He's working on a series of posters for Kubrick's movies, four of which are done already.

The Divine, a graphic novel by Boaz Lavie with art by Tomer and his brother Asaf, ships next week. Looks great.

Hanuka also created one of my favorite New Yorker covers, the Valentine's Day cover in 2014, titled Perfect Storm.

Blue is the new orange

A data analysis of paintings across the decades shows a market share gain for the color blue at the expense of the still predominant color, orange.

Orange and blue happen to be the two most popular colors in Hollywood's palette as well. Part of the predominance of orange is because human flesh tends to fall somewhere in that spectrum. There are many theories as to why color correction suites everywhere lean this way.

One explanation is that it's an over-adherence to complementary color theory.

This screenshot from the excellent color theory and exploration site, kuler, shows what happens when you apply complementary color theory to flesh tones.  You see, flesh tones exist mostly in the orange range and when you look to the opposite end of the color wheel from that, where does one land?  Why looky here, we have our old friend Mr. Teal.  And anyone who has ever taken color theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colors and put them next to each other, they will "pop", and sometimes even vibrate.  So, since people (flesh-tones) exist in almost every frame of every movie ever made, what could be better than applying complementary color theory to make people seem to "pop" from the background.  I mean, people are really important, aren't they?
 

Knowing a bit about the Hollywood blockbuster movie production process, it's not that surprising that a particular color palette would come into vogue. The whole idea behind franchises is risk mitigation and building off of what has worked before. The same colorists probably work on many of these movies, at this point they've probably got the orange and teal color palette saved as a preset. What's the economic incentive to innovation here? How many viewers go to such movies for the distinctive color palette?

Lost avant-garde painting shows up in Stuart Little

A long-lost avant garde painting has returned to Hungary after nine decades thanks to a sharp-eyed art historian, who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film Stuart Little.

Gergely Barki, 43, a researcher at Hungary’s national gallery in Budapest, noticed Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Róbert Berény as he watched television with his daughter Lola in 2009.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Bereny’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie. I nearly dropped Lola from my lap,” said Barki. “A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home.”

Crazy story. Berény was said to have dated Marlene Dietrich and Anastasia, the daughter of Nicholas II.

Robots take all the jobs (composer edition)

Xhail is a new service that offers a unique, custom score for your movie.

Here's the rub: the score is written by software, using real instrument stems. Instead of talking to a composer about what you want, you simply type in keywords like “fantasy” or “melancholy” and the software returns a score which you can customize using the interface provided. Add instruments, take out sections, add percussive emphasis at key timecode to match action on screen. The demo video gives a good sense of how it works.

Lots of details are still missing, like how much does it cost? Still, it's an impressive demo. The track composed for the fantasy short at the end of the demo video and the interface for modifying the video both were much better than I expected. You'd expect nothing less from a scripted demo video, and we'll have to wait for a public release to see if it's all that, but I'm intrigued.

I suspect many will rush to dismiss this service, especially my friends in the filmmaking world, just as people tend to do with any computer-generated art, but some of that, as always, comes from either a general technophobia or reverence for human creation.

If you can afford a real composer, this isn't a service targeted at you. Facetious title of my post aside, I suspect this is a less a case of replacing our existing composer supply than adding supply at the low end of the market.