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Introduction
The thing that separates a good film from a great film is its ability to tell a story through visuals alone. When you can look at a shot and feel everything the character is feeling, without any need for sound, that is when you know a filmmaker has done a good job.Cinema is a visual language that culminates a variety of techniques and principles to achieve the same end goal, which is telling a story and achieving a reaction from an audience. Whether it’s composition, movement, blocking or any of the other principles of filmmaking, the objective should always be utilizing these filmmaking techniques to tell your story. Whist there are hundreds of fundamental filmmaking concepts I could cover in this book, I have decided to focus on that of colour.
Almost 100 years ago, a monumental revolution in cinema came about with the introduction of colour on the big screen. Since then, a century of filmmakers has engaged with and harnessed this modern, exciting and vibrant method of storytelling after spending years hidden away in black and white shadows. In recent times, the chromatic volume has been cranked up to the max, becoming a key device used for semiotics, expression and symbolism.
Colour has been proven to have a massive psychological effect on people. Colour has influence over determining people’s moods, altering perceptions, as well as enhancing placebos. Colour is a powerful tool that can exploited by a filmmaker to further enhance a reaction from an audience. A sunny, optimistic yellow. A contemplative turquoise. A conspicuous, violent red. When an audience sees a colour in a film, the purpose and meaning behind that colour should never be accidental. As a filmmaker you should be utilising every tool in your arsenal to manipulate an audience’s emotion and a lot of the time colour is the right tool for that job. You should be carefully composing each frame of your film and making colour decisions that affect the audience’s experience of watching, even if they don’t initially realise it, colour has a powerful grasp over people’s subconscious
How does Colour Affect an Audience?
Colour to Express a Character’s Journey
Filmmakers can use colour to be adapted throughout the narrative of a film to reflect on a character’s arc one recent and great example of this would be Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film “Moonlight”, which won the academy award for best picture. Moonlight tells the story of a young boy named Chiron growing up in a rough neighbourhood and tackling his own identity amid a crack epidemic and a world full of bullies.Whilst telling this difficult and compelling story, director Barry Jenkins also wanted to capture the “magic of Miami”, the city where he grew up. Jenkin’s worked closely with cinematographer James Laxton and colourist Alex Bickel to achieve the look of the film, even working for hundreds of hours in post-production fine tuning and digitally altering the colour of the film to reach the mood and tone they wanted to achieve. When discussing the film Laxton said “Miami is an inherently colourful place, we were able to saturate colours and bend hues to enhance things.”
Even though Moonlight was shot digitally on the Arri Alexa Plus, Laxton and Bickel wanted to emulate three different film stocks to reflect the main character’s arc through the three chapters of the film. In the first part of the film where Chrion is a young boy known as “Little”, they emulate a Fujifilm stock which brings out lush greens and blues. In the second chapter where Chiron is a teenager, they emulated an Agfa stock which has a strange quirk that tints the highlights to a cyan colour, making the shots seem slightly off-kilter. And finally, in the third chapter where Chiron grows into an adult known as “Black”, the filmmakers use an emulation of a Kodak film stock, giving the film a more “Hollywood” look, feeling cleaner and more polished that the stock used in the previous two chapters. The changing of colour and tone progress with the character throughout the film, subconsciously taking the audience deeper into Chiron’s journey.
Colour to Communicate a Film’s Ideas
A filmmaker can use a colour to reflect the themes of their story. When a colour is repeated it becomes associated with an idea, and when the colour changes so does the idea.An obvious example of this would be the use of red and blue in the Star Wars franchise, using two very different colours to show the binary opposites of good and evil which is the driving theme of pretty much every Star Wars movie. When Anakin is on the light side his lightsaber is blue, but as the story progresses and Anakin turns to the dark side becoming Darth Vader, he starts using a red lightsaber. The colour reflecting the character’s morality.
Another great example of this would be in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece “Vertigo” the colour green is strongly associated with the character of Madeline, the colour pops up a lot in the film, reflecting John’s obsession with her and the fact that the thought of her is never leaving his head. The colour green then continues to become more prevalent and eerie all the way through to the film’s conclusion, shifting along with the narrative as it unfolds.
To reinforce the idea, another more recent and brilliant example would be in Denis Villeneuve’s film “Blade Runner 2049”. The use of colour throughout this film is striking and jaw dropping, winning Roger Deakins his long overdue Oscar for cinematography. Villeneuve and Deakins worked closely with designing the colour of the film. A lot of the movie is saturated in a murky blue or green, but whenever the protagonist comes to find a piece of information that is vital to the plot, an orange/yellow becomes noticeable. For example, the library at the Wallace headquarters is saturated in yellow, another example would be the scenes in Las Vegas, being the place where our protagonist finds Rick Deckard, who proves to play a pivotal part in Officer K finding the answers he’s looking for. The colour yellow becomes associated with information, and as the story unfolds in its climax, the colour becomes completely absent, transforming into a clearer white.
Colour to Manipulate the Audience’s Emotions
As mentioned before, colour has been proven to have a massive psychological effect over a character’s emotions. This can be used to enhance the feelings that the characters are experiencing in the narrative, drawing the viewer in closer to film.Pixar have become masters in using colour to make us empathise with a character, Danielle Feinberg, who is a director of photography at Pixar stated during a TED talk that “Lighting and colour are the backbone of emotion.”
A great example of this is in Brad Bird’s 2004 film “The Incredibles”. After a thrilling and exciting first act full of action and saturated colour, we are then introduced to Mr Incredible, now retired from being a superhero, now working in at an insurance firm, the film goes from bright and vibrant to a more sterile and desaturated grey colour palette, communicating the character’s state of depression and bore.
For all of their films, Pixar's filmmakers map out a “colour script” that maps out the hues for all the scenes, so the colours fit within the larger narrative arc with the goal of which is to make key moments of the film feel appropriately vibrant or sombre.
Another example of Pixar’s great use of colour is in the opening of their 2008 film “WALL-E”. The first part of the film makes use of absolutely no dialogue at all, relying solely on the visuals to tell the story. Earth has been completely deserted and polluted, to get this message across without words, the colour palette consists purely of tans and oranges, no other colour at all. The complete lack of colour not only sells the idea the world being desolate, but it also adds to the emotion and visual punch when WALL-E finds the living plant for the first time, up until this point the audience’s gaze has been completely washed of colour and then suddenly there’s an intense burst of a saturated green, emphasising the awe and wonder that the character is experiencing and also giving the audience this breath of fresh air in a world that is completely bled dry of its colour.
But it’s important to say whilst colour helps further a story, it must do so without being obvious and calling attention to itself. You don’t want the audience to notice it immediately, it has to act on a subconscious level otherwise it becomes distracting.
That was the first chapter from my debut book "The Colour of Film". If you liked this post and want to see more stuff like this, it would mean a lot if you could check out my book, "The Colour of Film" over on Amazon where I breakdown and discuss how filmmakers use colour to tell a story in films such as Blade Runner 2049, Moonlight, Schindler's List, Three Colours Blue and many many more. I've poured a lot of my knowledge and put so much effort into making this book, and it's only $3.99 on Amazon. It would seriously mean a lot and it goes a long way supporting me make more posts like this on here and on Instagram! Thank you!
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