Tumblr and How it is Ruining Movies

The first time my friend showed me her Tumblr, went like this:

Me: Oh I love Audrey Hepburn!

Her: Me to!

Me: What’s your favorite movie she’s in?

Her: Oh I’ve never seen any of her movies.

Me: Oh…so why did you put all of these pictures on your blog?

Her: Because they’re cool…

Me: Well you should watch this movie it’s really good.

Her: Yeah I don’t really like watching things in black in white.

Me: Then why do you post about them in your blog?!?!

It was a very frustrating experience and when I looked at my other friend’s blogs I found the same things. Gifs and pictures from movies that they didn’t know and had no intention of watching. It made me angry at first and then I just felt sad, because they are going to miss out on so many amazing films.

Tumblr is a world in which people can express themselves through other people’s expressions and I think its ruining movies. So many of my friends will post pictures from classic films and instead of thinking: “Wow this is a cool picture I should find out what this is and watch it” they think: “Wow this is cool, people are going to think I’m so cool and watch such cool movies”.  I think this  is what is keeping so many young people from diving into film: they can get all of this attention for liking interesting films without actually having to put in any energy. That’s not what films are for and that’s not what they are about.

What if this was all you ever saw of "Breathless"? What would you think it was?

Films are not a way to seem cool and unique, they are works of enormous effort that make huge statements, and they should be appreciated as such. This is the mentality a lot of young people have today. It is all about image, not actual knowledge or experience.

What is most upsetting is that many of these people would love these films if they only took the time to immerse themselves in them. But when gifs and pictures are enough, there is no need to actually sit through a whole movie. This technology is made to share ideas and images of things that people love but instead it is allowing people to only care how films makes them appear not how films may influence their lives.

Who knows if Marilyn Monroe even said this? Does anyone on Tumblr care? NO!

After I talked to my friend at great length about this she decided she would only post about things she had seen and that if she saw something she liked she would research it and watch it and as a result she has become really immersed in a lot of films and directors and has come to really love and appreciate film.  I only hope other people can do the same, and we can have a lot more film lovers in the world.

A new way of looking at films

I recently discovered a new tumblr, which is often dangerous to my productivity, but I've found this one particularly interesting as it offers an interesting new way of looking at films.  It is called moviebarcode, and it posts single images, or barcodes, representing the entire course of a movie.  These images are made up of a number of still frames, evenly distributed throughout the movie, which are then stretched upward so that only the main color information remains.  It offers a very nice, birds-eye view of the art direction and overall color tones and moods of a film.  There is also an index so that you can easily look up movies you are interested in.

O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)

For example, this is the barcode from the 2000 film "O Brother, Where Art Thou".  This was the first film to be digitally color graded in order to make an artistic choice.  In this case, much of the footage was tweaked to make the landscapes look drier and more golden, to fit the setting of the Dust Bowl in the midwest.  This is easily apparent in the barcode, which is overwhelmingly gold and beige.  You can also see, right at the very beginning, how the film starts out in black and white, before the saturation is added back in to produce the color.

The Matrix (1999)

Here's another example: The Matrix.  Almost every scene in The Matrix has a distinctive green tint to it, which is easily apparent in this image.

Harry Potter: Complete Series (2001-2011)

This is one of my favorite examples, because it shows some of the applications that these images could have.  This is all eight Harry Potter movies, sequentially, which means we can see some interesting trends.  First of all, we can see that the mood of the series gets progressively darker, until the last installment is almost entirely black.  This visual trend clearly follows the tone of the films and the stories themselves.  It also shows the differences in the styles of the directors; for instance, Chris Columbus filmed the first ones primarily inside, which is shown by all the warm tones at the beginning of the image.  When directing the third installment, Alfonso Cuarón made the conscious decision to shift to a more outdoors, location based film, which is shown in the abrupt transition to blues and greens.

By looking at multiple films at once like this, we can observe patterns, similarities, and differences that are both interesting and useful.  Using these images could be an easy way to examine multiple films by broad categories such as genre or time period, which might expose some of the stereotypes or tropes that are used in different types of filmmaking.