Spoiler: Its almost always an artistic choice. However, In some rare cases, its to make up for shit cameras: I'm looking at you RED/Hobbit trilogy. But nowadays its a choice to give the film a certain feel.
There was a while when all action movies were graded to look teal and blue: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho... However when cheaper cameras, better grading tools seeped into the masses, that style was felt to have been played out.
DI, the stage where the colour "grade" is tweaked, crafted and perfected is now an integral part of the edit/VFX stage. Colour is used to push emotion, just like sound and music design.
The bit about LUTs is mostly distraction. LUTs are normally used as a reference, to make sure that all the footage has roughly the same colour (important when you have different cameras for different scenes) They are static colour offsets, so are great for techincal colouring, but not overly useful for making an artistic grade.
TLDR: Its a fashion, just like the pricks who removed the obvious on/off indicators from slider buttons.
If you mean, a choice by the team making the movie, and not something imposed upon them by technology or otherwise, then yes.
But I'd say it's usually not very artistic as in artful, as it's neither well done, nor necessary for the story/mood, and is not even about a genuine vision from the director, but rather following the fad.
> If you mean, a choice by the team making the movie
thats art darling! exaggerated arm movements
I kid, but agree completely.
> not even about a genuine vision from the director, but rather following the fad.
I once heard about a monthly, where the exec producer's current shag was spit balling changes, expensive changes. It was great to see the faces of the VFX producer mentally totting up the cost.
Also when filming the prince of persia, the production team realised that they had a massive plot hole linking two parts of the movie, so they asked the VFX company to figure something out. From what I recall, this is the origin of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfVu52tZxd0
In clash of the titans(remake), they spent a boat load of cash on a real set for mount olympus, but then decided that they wanted to make it more "google maps-y" so scrapped it and redid it in VFX.
Some films are Art, others less so. None of them are as artistic as film theory dictates.
My favorite thing about modern, more-sensitive camera sensors is that "day-for-night" blue fake night scenes are much less common and there's more actual night shooting. Or maybe just more convincing VFX, I dunno. Either way, it looks better!
Old-style day-for-night is one of the biggest things that jumps out to me and makes a movie feel very dated now.
While this is possible (I have done and still do this as well), but it is absolutely not the norm.
Shooting day-for-night is much more common. It has less to do with the ability of a camera shooting at night. We have these things called lights that helps things.
The main reason for day-for-night is that it is much more expensive to shoot at night. Shooting off-hours is much more expensive. Shooting more than a certain number of hours away from home is also more expensive. There are a lot of things going into the decision of why a shoot is done the way it is, but you can pretty much always assume that it was done the way it was done because it was the cheaper option.
Yes, I clicked the link. I've shot this style several times, only you have to do it on a full moon. Full motion video with no lights. Even got the laurel wreaths for one of the videos. I've shot WFO at T/1.5 and ISO32000 on a Sony a7sii. One interesting thing that we noticed was catching lens flares from the moon. When stepping through the footage frame by frame, you can see the lunar surface details in the lens flares. Most peole never notice, but it's one of those things you get to enjoy once you know about it.
I've also taken that same camera to use as prime photography attached to my telescope. Cranked up the ISO, and it was the first time I was actually able to view the heavens as the scope slewed to its target. No more adjust position, take single long exposure test shot, adjust focus/position/etc. You can do it all in real time.
Yes, I'm fully aware of some of these camera types
The RED Epics used on the Hobbit (they used other REDs later on, but I can't remember what they were) were running at 48FPS. The set had to be painted in hilarious day glow colours for it to be picked up properly. Part of is was the 3d, a lot of it was the cameras. REDs were not very good for a long time. Sure had huge resolution, but that was literally it.
They were/are expensive. ".r3d" was a proper cock to deal with (Hurrah for cheap GPUs!) and the fan base utterly toxic.
What? Shooting at 48fps would not effect the color rendition ability of the camera. Nor would shooting 3D. Shooting a higher framerate just means more light required than shooting at 24fps. Shooting 3D also doesn't affect color. Where are you getting your information?
Debayering r3d was not an issue for professionals as they more than likely had a Red Rocket level card to deal with the footage.
> Shooting at 48fps would not effect the color rendition
doubles the amount of light you need. got to adjust the shutter angle to control motion blur. need to bump the ISO, which means more noise, which mean less optical resolution....
> Shooting 3D also doesn't affect color
Half mirrored camera rigs completely fuck your colour, well half of it...
> Debayering r3d was not an issue for professionals as they more than likely had a Red Rocket
They cost £4k, were fucking fragile, We broke two of them on one job. Debayering is simple, uncompressing the jpeg2000 at any speed was the main challenge in 2012.
There was a while when all action movies were graded to look teal and blue: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho... However when cheaper cameras, better grading tools seeped into the masses, that style was felt to have been played out.
DI, the stage where the colour "grade" is tweaked, crafted and perfected is now an integral part of the edit/VFX stage. Colour is used to push emotion, just like sound and music design.
The bit about LUTs is mostly distraction. LUTs are normally used as a reference, to make sure that all the footage has roughly the same colour (important when you have different cameras for different scenes) They are static colour offsets, so are great for techincal colouring, but not overly useful for making an artistic grade.
TLDR: Its a fashion, just like the pricks who removed the obvious on/off indicators from slider buttons.
EDIT: If you want to see some interesting grading, look up "day for night" https://noamkroll.com/color-grading-tutorial-creating-a-day-... where they take normal footage and make it look like it was shot at night