How to Color? 🎨

Hey Blog!

One of the visual aspects of film that interest me the most is the color scheme that each movie has depending on the style that it strives to achieve. When brainstorming ideas for how my partner, Sofia, and I wanted our film opening to look, we agreed we liked a very colorful aesthetic to represent a light-hearted feeling that we wanted when working within the "coming of age" genre. As such, I decided to do some research on how color schemes affect the overall meaning of the film and how we could use them to improve our filming when we keep in mind the effect that specific colors could have.

The psychology of color in film is often kept very similar from film to film as our brains already associate certain emotions with specific colors, but nothing is quite set in stone. Every filmmaker can assign a feeling to a color, even breaking the usual expectations for each color, and the intensity of said feeling can also vary based on the creator's choices. Hue, saturation, and brightness allow for a particular color to be seen in order to express a certain tone that can be different than that which the same color, albeit a different shade, exudes—a light blue representing calmness while a darker blue may represent power or authority. More than just a singular color however, the combination, or color scheme, that a director can put together can also help to set the right tone or mood for the film. There monochromatic, analogous, complementary, and triadic color schemes.

These schemes help to create a balanced color palette that can guide the viewers' emotions and help to  establish the film's theme. They can also help to emphasize important factors that drive the plot or message that the director is trying to portray. This can be done through discordant color, where the director actively chooses to deviate from the balanced color palette to refocus attention to specific details that would otherwise go unnoticed; there's also associative color schemes, a scheme in which color is specifically connected to a character or theme and builds an emotional reaction to said color; and finally, there are transitional color schemes in which the scheme shifts throughout the course of the story to represent transformation or growth.

After this research, I have some ideas of how Sofia and I could use color in our project to better convey the ideas of our film opening. We could use some warm colors—like yellow or orange—to portray the youth from the coming of age genre as well as innocence from a color like white, and, because we were playing around with the idea of summer, we could also use colors like green and blue to highlight nature and peace. Researching and learning about color so early in our production process is, I think, really helpful so that we can start thinking about factors like costume and set design so that we can implement color theories into it and make our project more visually interesting and symbolic. 

Sources:
Risk, M. (2024, November 27). How to use color in film: 50+ examples of movie color palettes. StudioBinder. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/how-to-use-color-in-film-50-examples-of-movie-color-palettes/