SEARCHING FOR COLOUR
When I have a spare moment or a spare thought, I often find myself searching for colour.
Colour is something we so often take for granted, or more wholly something we forget to appreciate. But there are times when we cannot help but notice. Those eyes when the light hits them in a perfect way. The sky deep into summer’s dusk. Colour is so important but I think sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by the lack of saturation and need to take further care in searching.
In filmmaking and art, one of the first things I notice is colour. Colour creates value and determines the balance of an image. It has direct visual appeal and can help to identify style and motifs of a particular auteur. Colour is an interesting investigation and I have decided to look at a few different displays and how they are used in filmmaking to create meaning.
The Envclave by Richard Mosse is a series of work filmed in Congo shot on 16mm infrared film which projects a spectrum of light invisible to the eye. The effect is seen through vivid pink and purple hues that mask the green vegetation. Colour is so important this Mosse’s work as it chronicles the once unseeable now vibrant – metaphorically to the crisis photography. Creating discordances with colour can help to direct the audiences’ eye to one particular thing.
Mosse was shooting in an unpredictable environment – this makes planning as more difficult than something of narrative form for example. Pixar’s animated films have months or preproduction and development before something of worth is created. Colour in animated films is an entirely controlled spectrum that can be altered quite easily in every stage of production. Pixar, as part of their concept art and storyboarding process create ‘color scripts’. Computer animation is often nonlinear process, and a colour script provides an early display of lighting and emotion in any given scene.
I think is a good display of colour attaching itself onto emotion in filmmaking, primarily through associations. Through an audiences generally perceived perception of reality, we can make some assumptions about colour. Blue can be supplementary to a feeling of calmness. Take myself for example, the first thing I think of at the image of blue, is clear skies. Blue attaches itself to serenity, as its most vocal form in everyday life is right above us. Green similarly, makes a direct connection to nature – because that’s we see it everyday. Green is the grass on my front lawn, the trees out back. Colours we see less often take different associations. Red is danger, warning, red is blood. Filmmakers are able to use these insights to control an audience’s perception.
Balance is important to creating aesthetically pleasing film. This can be achieved by finding colours that agree. For example colours on opposite ends of the wheel have been found to compromise each other, yet also compliment each other. An interesting way to look at this is to investigate ‘movie barcodes’. There are a few websites that show a single compressed image of the average colour in each frame of an entire film. This video explains it a bit better than I can:
(The Fixation of the Wizard of Oz from jeffrey moser on Vimeo.)
This database has a large range of films, dating from L’arrivée D’un Train En Gare de La Ciotat (1895) to Tommorrowland (2015). This gives an interesting look at the change of colour by decades and across a vast variety of films.
I found a few other websites with similar images, but I think that this one is the most useful to me, as it allows you to individual select each colour and see the frame from which it originated. This is interesting in seeing the changing colour schemes of films, particularly important as I think it allows me to implement and further my research of colour. For example back to finding Nemo, the beginning of the film has a section beaming with hues of red just before Nemo goes missing.