July 21 2011
(SPOILER)
First look at some of the costumes from The Avengers.
IGN has Captain America's new costume design and earlier First Showing had a peak at the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent uniforms.
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redeem147 | July 21, 03:45 CET
eddy | July 21, 03:58 CET
Saje | July 21, 04:05 CET
BreathesStory | July 21, 04:28 CET
Kaan | July 21, 04:32 CET
BringItOn5x5 | July 21, 04:46 CET
Yes. There's an answer too (and I don't think it's on TVTropes - yet.) ;)
[ edited by brinderwalt on 2011-07-21 14:07 ]
brinderwalt | July 21, 04:55 CET
Under normal circumstances, the real world has little to do with film and story telling. Kinda. Sorta. But you know how it goes… one has a few drinks while watching some sci-fi film, which riles up one's amateur passion for architecture, interior design, and holistic environmental design and then tries to apply 12.5 proof "logic":
Alcohol Inspired Problem: "Why is the future always so GD grey?" (non-metaphorically speaking) "And what's with the unhealthy blue light all the time?"
Alcohol Inspired Hypothesis: Since all that grey and blue flies in the face of the growing body of knowledge about what makes for an optimum creative, productive, and supportive human environment, some bad event must have happened to cause the loss of all that knowledge.
Current Alcohol Inspired Contender/Answer: The Cyberdyne induced apocalypse of 2029
Now logically, in film production land I'm sure it has something to do with grey being: 1. neutral with an ability to make colors pop onscreen and 2. being subliminally associated with concrete and metal (both hard materials) and therefore "gritty" and "real" and confusingly at the same time, dehumanizing.
I've long thought that sci-fi is the place where we as a culture create our future. It is our blessing and our curse. The mass culture tends to be conservative and unimaginative. So when artists and creators ask: What if? Why? and Wouldn't it be cool if ___? the ideas float out there and imprint and people accept it as a blueprint for the for the future. The main color for the corporate world is now grey. It wasn't 40 years ago.
None of which has much of anything to do with the helicarrier and her crew except for the fact that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s helicarrier designer(s) has/have also watched too many sci-fi shows and movies. Because it is grey. Q.E.D.
(FWIW, I think in actuality there seem to be four common schools of future environmental design in film:
1. The Grey School: Star Trek franchise, Terminator franchise, Alien franchise, etc.
2. The White School: Gattaca, Aeon Flux, 2001, etc.
3: The Chaotic School: The Fifth Element, Farscape, etc.
4. The Trash School: A post-apocalyptic specialty)
Whew! So, did my convoluted musings confuse you enough? I guarantee that if you have a drink it will sound amazingly insightful. … Maybe you should make that three drinks. ;-)
BreathesStory | July 21, 07:07 CET
digupherbones | July 21, 07:16 CET
Kaan | July 21, 07:35 CET
bobw1o | July 21, 07:41 CET
[ edited by digupherbones on 2011-07-21 16:43 ]
[ edited by digupherbones on 2011-07-21 16:43 ]
digupherbones | July 21, 07:42 CET
I can't wait to see the movie!
embers | July 21, 08:47 CET
A military crew with a Hawaiian shirt type pattern for a uniform... A challenge!...*thinking, thinking*...a Hawaiian shirt seems like an overly extreme of an example, but since there is a really wide range of patterns available as options...
Um, how about: in the future there are colonies on Mars that resemble tropical conservatories. Therefore, it is quite suitable and blendy to wear shirts with parrots on them. (Although, really by that time the military would have predator suits, doncha think? Well, at least the elite spec ops would. You know the grunts would still get the polyester no-iron parrots. Or tree frogs.)
I do believe that if for some reason the military higher ups thought that Hawaiian shirt prints either: A. could be argued to save lives, B. looked really cool, or C. would save a lot of money, they would indeed be regulation uniforms.
BreathesStory | July 21, 08:55 CET
On the color wheel, the opposite of those tones are mainly muted blues, so there's a kind of logic where one equals "past" and the other equals "future" (and they're both cracked). :)
Ghalev | July 21, 18:42 CET
janef | July 21, 18:44 CET
Sunfire | July 21, 18:44 CET
It's just a cameo appearance, as a monk, but I thought I'd mention it here as the link from First Showing had a couple pictures of the motorcycle(s).
ShadowQuest | July 21, 22:39 CET
I was with your Drunk-fu up to here BreathesStory ;) but Trek ?? Originator of the primary coloured uniform code ? They kinda had the opposite problem if anything (as far as the franchise in general goes I mean - 'Enterprise' had a fairly blue/grey militaristic look though). As to why, I agree that it's often about creating an impression of formality, neutrality, coldness, austerity etc. but I also think it's just that fictional space exploration organisations tend to draw parallels between themselves and Earth's navies/airforces, many of which, particularly in the Anglo world, wear blue/grey uniforms.
A military crew with a Hawaiian shirt type pattern for a uniform...
I humbly submit Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce. OK, he was barely military (kind of the opposite if anything) but still ;).
Saje | July 22, 03:15 CET
The other choices are:
- in Blade2, they went with blues for daytime, yellows for nighttime. (An easy way to give information to the audience without being too obvious.)
- moving forward at near light speed will blue-shift, receding will red-shift
OneTeV | July 22, 06:04 CET
Nebula1400 | July 22, 12:26 CET
1. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the whole Trek thing, I gotta admit. Perhaps not the best example. It's been a while since I really watched any. I think the last time I was…um, the last film (once) and that time when there was a link here to the DS9 Tribble episode. In my memory though, starting with NG, the grey was in the environments (ships etc.), presumably so the neutralness of grey could help make all those colors pop. (I mentioned that ability above.) And while they didn't have the blue light (which would have been totally inappropriate) they did switch to a much more subdued lighting scheme - more "sophisticated and edgy" I guess. The original series I think was a bit brighter of a pallet - I remember the ship having a lot of white backgrounds and being brightly lit. (All of which could be totally wrong in which case… I'm gonna plead fever induced fuzziness. Who gets sick in the middle of the summer? Sheesh. And…and…and… hot weather - 102 F in the shade at 5 PM and no air-conditioning. Fried brains. Yep. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Fried brains. Unless, I'm right. In which case, Bully for me. ;-)
2. Well, if you're gonna bring, like, practical logic into it…Boring! I like my catastrophic event idea better. : ) Actually, from a production design/costume design standpoint, blue and grey in western culture have always meant seriousness - like grey and blue suits in business. And sci-fi movies are usually trying to prove how serious they are. (I'd like to see the Wes Anderson version of future space sci-fi…) I'm sure most designs do tend to mine our cultural imprints as OneTeV suggested.
I'm sure that the whole space=navy thing does play a role too. But ya know, the US navy also has a bit of beige/service khaki in it for officers. Which, if you think about the idea of uniform colors coming from the environment to which they are primarily related... beige might actually be the more appropriate choice, since the universe is apparently the color of a latte. (Or white. There seems to be a little disagreement. But latte sounds more romantic.) I think beige uniforms would be a hard sell to a production designer for a future sci-fi story though.
3. The interesting thing to me, is the whole Ouroboros-ness of it all. (It's like film induces a weird time-travel conundrum.) I've known people in the US army who were responsible for buying uniform stuff and they are definitely influenced by the sci-fi they see, which was then influenced by RL uniforms, etc. ad nauseum. Of course I guess we all are. Star Trek TOS now has us all wearing t-shirts as the default uniform of the people. ;-) See? Creators need to be careful what they put out there...
BreathesStory | July 23, 05:08 CET