At some point, however, orange and teal froze into a dogma—a dogma in the religious sense, with fanatical evangelists and even inquisitors. Now if you look up the words “orange and teal,” you will see that it is scientific fact that orange-and-teal color grading looks better in movies and videos. One of the top results when Dr. Boli tried the experiment was a video called “Why Teal & Orange Is Scientifically More Cinematic.” Even Adobe, the monopolistic titan of the design business, has an article entitled “Why you should use orange and teal color grading” (although, to give them credit, they have recently toned down the title to “Why you should try orange and teal color grading for videos”).
It is very difficult to find other colors than shades of orange and teal in a film these days. It’s the revenge of two-strip Technicolor.
Dr. Boli is not the only one who is thoroughly tired of the orange-and-teal look, but it is hard to make go away, because a generation of filmmakers has grown up knowing that film and video must go through a postprocessing stage in which all the colors are pushed into the orange and teal ranges.
And why orange and teal? Because orange and teal are complementary colors, and complementary colors look good together. Most artists would tell you that. But why not other pairs of complementary colors? Because human flesh is in the orangish range; and since movies are usually about humans, teal must be the other color. “Many skin tones fall into the orange spectrum,” says Adobe, “so pushing blues into the shadows will help those skin tones stand out.”
And that gives us our one word to bring the whole house of orange-and-teal cards tumbling down. Orange-and-teal is racist.
There is absolutely nothing a Hollywood filmmaker fears more than being called a racist. (In Dr. Boli’s experience, it is usually racists who are afraid of being called racists; but he will not pursue that line of thought further at the moment.) The orange-and-teal dogma assumes that European flesh is the default tone for human flesh. It is as transparently racist as it can possibly be.
So there, if you have entered a debate with a videographer or filmmaker about the necessity for orange-and-teal color grading, is your Big Bertha. Use it wisely—but you’ll probably have to use it.
Meanwhile, if you would like to see how it is possible to make a film that looks beautiful without restricting yourself to orange and teal, you can look at La Cucaracha from 1934, the first live-action film shot entirely in the new three-strip Technicolor process. In the very first shot after the titles, you will see a woman wearing orange and teal. And then you will see green, and purple, and red, and deep blue, and yellow, and violet, and magenta—all the colors that could not be rendered in two-strip Technicolor. You will fall in love with color as a sensation, perhaps enough to make you forget that you are watching an otherwise mediocre two-reeler. It made the Academy forget: La Cucaracha won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject in the Comedy category in 1934.