How do we make color gritty and cool in fantasy?

We all know that medieval clothing was colorful as fuck. This begs the question, 'why do all the nobles in all the medieval movies/tv shows wear dirt shit brown?' The simplest answer in my mind is that dirt shit brown is gritty and cool.

Now neither I, nor movie producers could give a flying fuck if you think dirt shit brown is gritty and cool, but knowing that producers and executives think that way, How do we make color gritty and cool in fantasy?

Getting red back in could be a first step, but what's next? Maybe purple

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youtu.be/GWmGrR9a818?t=143
youtube.com/watch?v=nyObRjQjx8I
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"Gritty" has lost all meaning, like, two GoT seasons ago. Now people use it as "things i think are good". It's a buzzword.

You have a point, however my question still stands. How do we make color cool enough for fantasy?

>needing to be "gritty" and "cool"

Use it, essentially. Have the people who are clearly supposed to be the cool badasses wear medieval colourful garb. Have people realise that when they see that, they're not seeing 'fancy' people, but a bunch of wealthy bastards who probably killed their way to earn enough wealth to buy those dyes.

>Getting red back in could be a first step, but what's next?
Bring back yellow and gold. Medieval armies, for those who could afford it, weren't "grim and gritty" in the sense that they were dirt brown and blended in with everything. They were grim and gritty in the sense of "LOOK AT ME YOU POOR PEASANT PIECE OF SHIT, CAN YOU SEE ME? OF COURSE YOU CAN SEE ME, EVEN IF YOU TRIED LOOKING AWAY YOU'D STILL FUCKING SEE ME. KEEP LOOKING AT ME AS I TRAMPLE YOUR PEASANT ASS INTO THE DIRT. IN FACT, GO WHINE TO YOUR PEASANT FRIENDS AND BREAK FORMATION, MAKE MY JOB EASIER!"

Seriously, medieval knights wanted to be seen. They wanted to be in your face and intimidating.

This idea needs to be pitchable to a stupid movie executive to work, so yeah, it needs to be gritty and cool to work.

That could work if medieval protagonists actually fucking wore armor to battle instead of the fucking brown cumstained, peasant-whore, bedsheets they wear in movies and shows

That'd also be good, because you could actually have stuntmen wearing the highly identifiable armor your character wears do the fightscene instead of your mal-coordinated, pampered British/American juvenile heroes.

Red guy vs green guy. You don't need faces on display or jump cuts to convey emotion.

>gritty and cool as a synonyms
I cringed a little

That's not what he implied, or what he wrote. "And" does not mean "is the same as".

>cringing at someone uses adjectives to describe a trope
I cringed

They somehow managed it in the 60's...

>being gay
I cringed a lot

Color didn't exist in medieval times, everything was gray, shit brown on a desaturated grayish-blue.

>Color didn't exist in medieval times, everything was gray, shit brown on a desaturated grayish-blue.

Why do all our movies and shows do this these days?
I kinda want to say that they are just aping after GoT but it's been like this since the 90's.

Okay, sir Gayalot

I remember when the Mad Max trailer came out, I heard people saying "holy shit, look how much color is in there! I forgot action movies could have color!"

So, I think the trick is energy. You need a lot of energy to make gritty colorful and cool.

like this

This. While it's easy to hate on GoT for this "brown is gritty and REALISTIC" trope it's not anything new. It's symptomatic of a long-standing trend in audiences where they equate color with lightheartedness. Watching old 80s fantasy movies like Conan or Dragonslayer and people are wearing the same greys, blacks, and dirt browns. This is the "visual" component of "visual storytelling". Film and TV can't rely on a good author's prose, they have to use visual cues. GoT is a dour, cynical show, so it's not using colors and patterns most audiences associate with happiness and optimism.

It's the same reason most modern superhero movies and shows redesign the costumes so they're basically just wearing dark-shaded kevlar versions of their iconic outfits.

Film and television are really the main perpetrators of this. Vidya kind of got there in the early 2000s, but look back at older fantasy titles like Legend of Zelda or Ultima and you find a wide variety of tones and colors in the vein of actual medieval settings. And if you read books, it's all over the place because print makes it easier to convey mood without relying on visuals. In the actual GoT books, Gurm frequently describes knights and nobles wearing bright patterns and colors. The only guys wearing the dirt brown are the Northerners because they're all joyless fucks who bundle themselves up against the elements without much concern for color.

it's not like there isn't any color in GoT, or at least there wasn't in the first season and a half (I stopped watching).

Castle Black was monochrome, but that was it's thing. Kings Landing was full of color, the East had plenty of color, etc. Things got covered in dirt, but color covered in dirt is a good way to have color seem realistic.

The other way is to go more stylized, where you get stuff like the Daredevil show or old Dick Tracy, use blacks and darkness, but over saturate the colors rather than desaturate. Destauration is used to seem dark, when that's not it's effect. It's good for creating the effect of dark as in meloncoly, regret, despair, sorrow, etc. Bad for dark as in anger, fear, depravity, etc.

Look up the character designs of Witcher games, 3 in particular now that their characters look like humans over some kind of troll monsters who had strokes and sneezed with their eyes open.

At least for film and TV, red is difficult to film because it bleeds, and the problem gets worse the more saturated it is.

Checking out designs for The Witcher would be a good start.

There is some color in GoT, but it's pretty toned down and monocrhome. The most vibrant it really gets is the Lannisters wear a bit of red and yellow, but the yellow is very saturated and almost beige.

But half the action takes place up North, where everyone wears brown and black.

To me, it was the landscape in Fury Road that had all the color, though you might be onto something. The biggest problem with that is that most castles are grey and/or shit brown. Maybe modern fantasy needs to borrow some inspiration from Russia and India and make castles colorful. Fuck idk...

Pissed puke yellow tint and confused lines?

So you just need to slaughter disgusting plaguebeasts in vibrant colors like some twisted version of amazonian tribal warfare

Good point...

I don't have any insult, so just think of something bad about yourself

FLAMBOYANT
FISH
HELMS

>GET THA HAMMER IT'S GOT ME

Have you seen Hellboy? Hard lighting and saturated colors can work together pretty beautifully. Of course, off the top of my head only Snyder tries this shit with live action, and I'm not a fan of his approach.

>forget what colors actually look like because literally almost every mainstream movie or tv show is desaturated as fuck
>play Witcher 3
>colors fucking everywhere

thank you based slavs

It's not just the bright colors that are at issue here.

It's the fact that many historical costumes look utterly ridiculous to modern eyes. It's hard for a modern audience to look at a 13th century man's braeis (linen boxer shorts) and separate hose and not snicker, and that's before we get into things like long, pointy shoes and codpieces.

You can see excellent examples of the historical costume problem in the Witcher 2. Everyone else has these wonderfully imaginative, well-researched reproductions of 13th century Polish fashion, and here's Geralt running around in a pseudo-modern Leather Jacket, modern pants and boots with a heel and rounded toe that LITERALLY NOBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD WEARS.

Example of what braies and hose look like to illustrate my point.

Well, there was the dumb grimdark Robin Hood in the 90s, but the 90s wasn't a big decade for decent medieval movies. More of a 2000s thing, starting with Gladiator and the second two Lord of the Rings movies.

Reminds me of those Akira Kurosawa movies where all the lesser characters have period appropriate awful looking topknots, but the hero and main antagonist have modern haircuts.

>"Gritty" has lost all meaning, like, two GoT seasons ago.

I think you mean since the fucking 90s.

Lord of the Rings had some decent color to it, though it was still a little monochrome.

In their defense though, Tolkien goes into great lengths painting that kind if picture. I swear grey was his favorite color.

Malay here. We still wear gaudy bright traditional clothing. Our Royalty used to have monopoly on the colour yellow. Even now, it is faux pas to wear yellow in the presence of Royalty.

I'm honestly drawing a blank trying to think of more than a handful of gritty 90s medieval or fantasy movies. Or 90s medieval or fantasy movies in general.

Braveheart? A bit gritty, but it takes place in the shithole known as Scotland.

Robinhood? Sure.

Dragonheart? Not gritty.

Awful decade for medieval or fantasy movies. Hell, awful for movies in general.

>Awful decade for movies
>What is Terminator 2
>What is Jurassic Park
>What is Thin Red Line
>What is Saving Private Ryan
>What is Forrest Gump
>What is The Shawshank Redemption
>What is The Truman Show
>What is The Big Lebowski

Come the fuck on, user.

Half of those are overwrought melodramas.

T2 and Lebowski are alright, but I don't exactly rewatch them often.

>What is Terminator 2
>What is Jurassic Park
>What is The Big Lebowski
The only movies on that list that were bearable to watch the first time, with The Big Lebowski being the only one that can be watched multiple times.

Funny thing is even though Braveheart is colorful it gets everything else completely fucking wrong.

it was more than just intimidation. You wanted every soldier if you could to have a colorful uniform

if both armies are brown and gritty, how do you know which one is yours?

Geralt is kind of excused as witchers need to stay very mobile, and long pointy shoes is not good for that

Yeah, the general fashion is a problem, but I do think it should be possible to incorporate color into modernly acceptable clothing.

Shields like these would be a good start.

Fuck colour. Green, brown, white, and cream. That's all you need.

Tolkiencore or bust.

What mod?

I heard it's a postmodernist trope to draw more focus to people.

I don't understand postmodernism.

A combination of concerns both technological and narrative, aesthetic and practical.

My question is, what are you comparing these medieval-themed media to / aiming for when asking for change? Give me an example of a television show or movie that you think makes excellent use of variety of colour.

there's an unintentionally amusing scene in GoT where a character wearing generic brown leather whatever points at his clothes and says "these are the kings colours"

youtu.be/GWmGrR9a818?t=143

1212 AD Medieval Kingdoms mod

youtube.com/watch?v=nyObRjQjx8I

moddb.com/mods/medieval-kingdoms-total-war-attila-version

Not technically medieval, but I applaud Battlefield One for showing that world war one wasn't just brown trenchmud everywhere.

Because red and green dyes were fucking insanely expensive, so unless you were a member of the upper aristocracy, you didn't wear them. Same with purple and indigo.

You wore mostly leathers and woolens, which are respectively brown and white-soon-to-be-brown-when-it-gets-dirty. In wintertime you need furs and woolens, and you can't dye them bright red.

That's why.

hate to agree, but yeah

peasants didn't war much... it was the job of the rich.

>all fokker dr1 are red because of the red baron

Colored accents.

Red scarfs, gold trim, etc.

That's because most castles are ruins. Back when they weren't ruins, they were covered in white plaster and painted all over, with flags and carpets and tapestries and fancy furniture. Castles were places where rich fucks lived and tried to impress their rich fuck friends when they would come over to visit.

Witcher 3 managed it pretty well.