Choosing Colors

The Grand Budapest Hotel exercise has shown me that color schemes can change quite frequently throughout a film. These color changes can represent changes in the themes or introduce new symbols in your animation. What I have learned from this particular film is that you don't have to hold yourself to any one particular color scheme. In fact, you can go as far as to change the color scheme on a shot by shot basis. The hotel sequence is an astounding example of this by using the different color combinations to show diversity. This helps the viewer to understand that the hotels are in quite different and exotic locations across the world. The use of color in costuming is also just as essential as it's use in the production design. Through this lesson on color and its potential implementations I have had a complete change of perspective on the use of color in film. Adobe color is an extraordinary tool for deciding what color scheme to use. The way that I will use this tool in order to better my understanding and use of color is to see the color scheme of particular scenes in film. I will reverse engineer the color schemes by seeing the emotion portrayed in the film and then seeing the color scheme used to portray that emotion. By doing this I will be able to build a library of color schemes to use for particular emotions.

When it comes to this animation in particular I looked at the color schemes of the city in Spiderman Into the Spider-verse. By doing this I am able to use the same emotions conveyed by the film in order to allow the audience to relate my spiderman animation to an actual spiderman animated feature. Through this process the audience will subconsciously link my animation to a preexisting work with similar context and characters. The main reason I picked this particular color scheme is because I enjoy the sense of freedom and definition. The film uses many neon colors to create emphasis and guide the view of the audience to better the overall understanding of the film. By mimicking great schemes at first it will allow me to learn the trade of guiding and captivating the eye of the audience. For myself as an individual interested in film I also want to use this as a way to better my cinematography in the world of cinema.

For my career in the future I will continue to strengthen my use of color by simply experimenting with new ways of implementing schemes. I was also thinking about using blender as a way to set up shots and test lighting and how it might look in a film. I am not only hoping to learn how to use color but also lighting. The main point I like to keep in mind when creating my color schemes is its effect on the audiences comprehension of the story. The story is the most important part of the film and the part that must be emphasized and made as clear and understandable as possible. Color has a very prominent impact on the emotions that are correlated with a particular scene. This goes hand in hand with implementing a lack of color as well. If you want a scene to seem particularly dreary for instance you could desaturate the colors or maybe add a bleach bypass. Color is a very complicated and important part, whether you're aware or not, of creating a believable environment. For this reason I also like to think about using color to make the environment breath and have a life and reality of it's own.