Critical Analysis- Research and Enquiry

My research has covered use of colour in moving image since the beginning of colour in moving image, looking at how colour progressed from hand painted techniques, to technicolor and through to the current digital era. I also explored academics opinions on current colour methodologies and observed the world around me. Through my critical analysis I’m hoping to tie my research together and to assess my own working methodology in obtaining it.

Through looking filmmakers work it appears obvious to me that although there are thought out colour structures that many artists start with, the most fantastical uses of colour in moving image are when those methodologies are reinterpreted. Knowing the general cognitive effects of colour to your audience is important in allowing you to make the correct colour choices, particularly regarding the value and saturation of the colour used. As we have seen in the works of those who dared to step out of the ordinary schemes, particularly regard the work of Wes Anderson in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ or of the film ‘Hero’, these are where new unconventional theories regarding colour are innovating from, and it is because of those films that I believe that an individual artist or filmmaker who is considering why they are doing what they are doing can essentially make up their own rules. They can tell the story however they choose and if that means blood red represents happiness then so be it.

I begun this process thinking colour connections and meanings don’t carry much weight globally, I have since changed my mind, colour can have meaning but what I’ve learned is that there is a method of using colour that will enlighten your work and that essentially it is often preferable to make up your own meaning. I would argue that that is the modern colour theory.

Older colour theories are dictated by the technologies of the time, and because of our psychology we regard the use of those formulas as pleasing to the eye. In lower budget digital film colour has been somewhat put to one side, however the moving images we reflected on were focusing on colour and were strongly considering how an audience will react. A lot of time was spent considering this and formulating their own artistic ideas and thence testing the boundaries of what hasn’t gone before them; innovation.

Recent studies have concluded that a 21st Century audience has poor color memory with regard digital moving image. (Block, 2008). Through using whimsical or unexpected amounts of colours artists like Anderson, Jonze and many others create an immediate association with their work.

Another reflection I’d like to make is how colour is noted very often in musical terms, Maurice Nobel and Natalie Kalmus talked about creating colour harmonies and colour scores respectively,  Wallace Riminigton’s ColourMusic expressed that,

“Color, like music, is both precious for its own sake and as an educative influence. It can also stimulate the imagination and develop other mental faculties; can give pleasure and refreshment to the mind, and increase the responsiveness of the sense to which it appeals” (Riminigton 1912).

My reasoning for highlighting this is because although those are all artist’s of the 20th century my own colour education was not different at all. At third-level the little that was spoken about colour on my animation degree from Bournemouth University was from one-on-one discussions with tutors discussing with me how colour should be used in animation, and my tutors view was to think of it terms of musical harmonies, which is what led me to creating colour inventories for my work, in light of this research I now question whether musical-like colour balancing is outdated. As O’Connor pointed out, these potentially outdated views, need to be reviewed and re-explored for a modern digital era. From doing this research I wholly believe colour, even the differences, contradictions and confusions between artists methodologies is vastly important and is to be explored and researched at university level.

Looking at my own methodology, the beginning of this project confused me a lot, I found that some my my bibliography entries were becoming reflections on the texts I was reading, I think that as I progressed with that process I begun to understand more so what was expected of me. My research technique was to begin by reading the texts I thought relevant to my subject matter and to listen to how these authors were displaying colour and particularly colour in moving image. I travel a lot so these texts became my travel companion.Microsoft’s ‘sticky notes’ became an invaluable tool and assisted me in finding all the quotes I wanted to mention when the time came to actually writing the blog entry, I observed early detail of interest to me so with editing a lot of these notes got curtailed. My texts hailed from 20th and 21st centuries and so I was constantly considering, is this still relevant with today’s technology, I was pleased when I found that Zena O’Connor was asking the same questions.

During this period of reading and research I begun to watch all the films I could that were recognised for their colour uses, before beginning to critically reflect on those, making reference to the content and issues that I explored in my bibliography readings. I found it somewhat challenging to work in this way and I believe that a lot of that is to do with the part-time nature of the course, my mind is often on other things, so switching back to my masters work could be sometimes frustratingly difficult. I found myself making notes and draft blog posts when I could and then finishing them off at a later date. If I had the luxury of devoting myself to research full time I would be much more focused in my results.

Do I feel that I achieved and learned something in my research? Yes very much so, I know now to consider more deeply the hows and whys of colour. When watching the pictures I studied I found I began to consider colour choices in the film as I was watching, colour was certainly my priority and I was constantly pondering why certain choices were made and if modern digital artists even considered those choices before shooting their film, or was it all part of post production.

 

Polson, T., Noble, M. and Jones, C. (2013) The noble approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of animation design. Thousand Oaks, CA, United States: Chronicle Books.

Block, B. (2008). The visual story: Creating the visual structure of fi lm, TV and digital media. New York, NY: Focal Press.

Higgins, S. (2007) Harnessing the technicolor rainbow: Color design in the 1930s. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

O’Connor, Z. (2010). Black-listed: Why colour theory has a bad name in 21st century design education. Available at: http://connected2010.eproceedings.com.au/papers/p4.pdf (Accessed: 30 October 2016).

Rimington, A.W. (1912) Colour-music.

 

 

What happened to the tacky animated Christmas lights?

I’ve recently returned from my mainland UK residence to my small Irish town, to be ‘at home’ for Christmas.

My childhood memories of this place were a town that reused the same old, half broken Christmas lights that you were guaranteed to see year after year. There were a few particularly bad ones, I scoured the net for images of a large gold and red flashing snowflake form that if memory serves me correctly was dressed in tinsel.

I was surprised this year to see a trend hit the town that I never thought would, bland blue/white LED lights. Where has all the tat gone? The dancing reds, greens and golds modernised with static blues.

I thought this loosely relevant to what we’ve been looking at through our blog, as it signifies how people’s attitudes to colour has changed. Animated coloured lights, across the UK are becoming old-fashioned, the big cities don’t have them anymore, and now it seem small towns are beginning to follow suit. The modern light, is neat, non-obtrusive and non-offensive, to me we’ve lost a bit of magic by losing the colour from our lights.

 

Unusual Colour Transitions

Many films use colour transitions for various reasons, the beginning of this was when filmmakers realised they could use colour as an integral part of the story.

    

fig.01                                                                                  fig.02

Greed (1924) is a black and white film that uses early colour tinting techniques. The gold coins are hand painted on the film strip to be yellow, fig.01, as the protagonist’s greed grows the entire film is coated in yellow, showing how he has become completely consumed by his greed. ‘Greed’ is a good example of colour progressively transiting to aid the story.

Another interesting method of using colour to transition the story is in the film ‘Hero’ 2002, here director Zhang Yimou uses colour to establish different characters points of view.

fig.03

 fig.03 shows an example of Yimou using the scene to visibly show you that you are witnessing different characters perspectives. Admittedly, of all of the films I’ve referenced throughout the blog this is the one I am yet to see, so my knowledge of it was based on word-of-mouth and an online synopsis.

I would however be quite interested to incorporate this type of technique in my own short films, to see first hand how successful the technique is. You could argue that Pixar is using a similar technique in ‘Inside Out’, it isn’t a colour transition, however colouring the characters to represent emotions separate their personalities in a loosely similar way.

 

fig.01: https://wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/snapshot_dvd_00-08-24_2010-03-22_20-12-34-greed.jpg

fig.02: https://michaelgloversmith.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/greed.jpg

fig.03: https://mishkanyc.com/sites/default/files/styles/blog_inline/public/hero.jpg?itok=mBrofsDV

(2002) Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/synopsis (Accessed: 17 December 2016).

Inside out (2015) Directed by Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen USA: .

Visual Language in Games

My previous post looked at how colour schemes balance an image and how the use of classic colour schemes in moving image is pleasing and non-obtrusive to viewers. There are times in moving image where you don’t want the scene to feel balanced, for example, when you want to draw the audiences eye to a certain area, one of the most obvious of these is in the visual language in video games. Visual language in games is where game developers need to highlight what moves to make in a game so that a player does not become stagnant or confused.

My day job is as an artist for computer games, so visual language is something I struggle with on a daily basis. I’m always trying to make my scenes feel balanced, harmonious and cohesive but often I’m told it’s not clear enough what you are meant to be doing, and so often the solution, for example, is to make all the jumpable areas bright red, or to use high saturation in some way to draw a players eye to the area.

Primary Balance

It seems that from my research so far, I’ve been drawing attention to where directors are using colour in their films in a manner that is unusual and that makes the film stand out, and perhaps drawing attention to the artists intention behind the meaning of the colour itself.

Generally most filmmakers and artists want to create a sense of balance in their work, and this is often achieved by using colour schemes. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of considering basic colour schemes in my work before getting too deep into it.

fig.01

Fig.01 shows some of the most popular colour schemes used by artists to create balance in their work. Interestingly I recall being taught about these schemes in primary school but when studying colour at university level they were not taught in any more depth, perhaps Zena O’Connor’s theory on colour not being taught in 3rd level education was correct. Saying that it is true that these schemes create a harmony in an image that allows you to read the image without being distracted.

Amelie(2001), fig.02 is a great example of the complementary colour scheme being used to balance an image, the film uses red and green throughout.

  fig.02

fig.03

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012) uses analogous scheme.

fig. 04

Pierrot le Fou (1965) uses a triadic colour scheme.

So we can see that these classic schemes are still being used in moving image to create a balanced image that doesn’t detract from the audiences viewing experience.

 

 

fig.01: http://www.phoenixtapware.com.au/article/5-ways-to-choose-your-bathroom-colour-scheme

fig.02: http://imoviequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/1-Amelie.jpg

fig.03: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2OOenYz6tfc/maxresdefault.jpg

fig. 04: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e0/95/ff/e095ff484b7910a308c0dedb1a9b9b7c.jpg

O’Connor, Z. (2010). Black-listed: Why colour theory has a bad name in 21st century design education. Available at: http://connected2010.eproceedings.com.au/papers/p4.pdf (Accessed: 30 October 2016).

A New Hue – my approach to colour

‘A New Hue’ was a CG animation I made during my undergraduate degree with two others, Stephen Tucker and George Rigby.

As one of my roles on the project was to deal with the texture and colouring, I thought it relevant to discuss my own personal approach to colour.

Below are a selection of stills from the short film, as you can see the majority of the film is colourless until Lily, our protagonist meets an adorable blob of ink, Blot, who colours in her world.

Even in the white scenes, we’ve used subtle blues and pinks to create the feeling of warmth, otherwise the paper felt to uninviting and grey.

fig.01

In the final scene the world becomes empowered with colour, when preparing to create this scene I made a colour inventory, fig.02, unlike traditional blocked colour palettes, using a colour inventory in my work allows me to determine how much of each colour should be used in the scene, to try to create a balance.

fig.02

fig.03

fig.03 is the final scene render, which you can compare to the colour inventory to establish it’s successfulness. My pastelic but bright colour choices were to me representing Lily’s soft, kind personality, while reflecting Blot’s boisterousness through the way they were dotted around the environment. The colours in this piece connect Lily and Blot, they are a key part of the storytelling, Lily is able to see a new way of life through the colour, she comes out of her shell to an unknown change.

Another interesting thing to note about this scene is how I’ve sectioned the colour, the pink is in one area, the blues are in another area, the yellows are symmetrical. Nothing is too instrusive on another element, I sectioned them like this to allow the scene to be readable. Although the scene is busy and colourful we still need to be focusing on what the main characters are doing.

The colours in A New Hue were well received and tend to be what the film is remembered for; it is a short film about colour after all.

You can read more about A New Hue and watch the film on my website: http://www.jennifer-hardy.com/fashion

Hardy, J. (2015) Jhardy. Available at: http://www.jennifer-hardy.com/fashion (Accessed: 10 December 2016).

Red in ‘We need to talk about Kevin’

Red is key part of the Lynne Ramsey’s film, ‘We need to talk about Kevin’, here colour is not associated with a character in particular, but rather acts as a reminder that the undercurrent of the film is violence. Red in this film is reminiscent of blood.

fig.01

While the red reminds us of the violence that haunts the characters minds, the film often contrasts the red with blues, blue is often present in the lighting of the film.

My previous two reflective posts, about the films ‘Her’ and ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ were also covering how the director has carried one colour through the film, in each instance the colour in question however has been used differently or to mean different things.

In ‘Her’, the single colour on the single man isolated him. In ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’, the blue connected the two main characters, and finally in ‘We need to talk about Kevin’, the colour is used in various places throughout the film and acts as a symbolic undertone to remind an audience of the deeper story.

 

fig.01: (https://c8ic8.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/mothering-psychopathy-and-we-need-to-talk-about-kevin/)

 

RED in Her

Red has been described throughout the books I’ve looked at as a colour of high energy, it in the moving image industry is almost a colour to fear, whether because of traditional technological issues with red or simply because very little looks good when it’s RED. Personally I associate red with being wrong, like when a teacher marks your homework; it just isn’t a peaceful colour.

However in Spike Jonze’s film ‘Her’, the colour red is used from the beginning surrounding the lead character, and there is never an overwhelming feeling that he is wrong, or passionate, or angry. Many film-reviewers have actually suggested that the colour red was used a visual separator, and that Jonze and Hoyte (the cinematographer) concoct rules that make their films visually different from others. Production designer, K.K.Barrett spoke in an interview to the Los Angeles Times,

“When Spike and I worked on Where The Wild Things Are we banned green, then we slipped some in. Hoyte [van Hoytema, the cinematographer] wanted to avoid blue, then we said ‘OK, let’s do one scene with blue.’ We didn’t want it to seem too dystopian or foreboding. And there was so much blue sky we wanted to avoid it on the ground. We were all really enamored with red. If you look closely there’s a little bit of red in every frame. It just gave it all a warmer feeling. But these decisions are all a little whimsical.” (Zeitchik, 2013)

The use of red felt fitting to the character, it did appear to reflect his warmth and his loneliness, and in my opinion said a lot about who that character wanted to be.

 

 

Genero (2016) ‘Considering Colour: The use of red in spike Jonze’s film “her” – Genero Blog’, Filmmaking, 6 April. Available at: https://genero.tv/blog/2015/considering-colour-the-use-of-red-in-spike-jonzes-film-her/ (Accessed: 3 December 2016).

Chew-Bose, D. (2014) Lonely palette: The economy of Colour in spike Jonze’s her. Available at: http://hazlitt.net/feature/lonely-palette-economy-colour-spike-jonzes-her (Accessed: 3 December 2016).

ScreenPrism (2015) In ‘her,’ what’s the significance of the color red. Available at: http://screenprism.com/insights/article/in-her-whats-the-significance-of-the-color-red (Accessed: 3 December 2016).

Times, L.A. and Zeitchik, S. (2013) Five days of ‘her’: Building a future to feel like the present. Available at: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/24/entertainment/la-et-mn-spike-jonze-her-production-future-johansson-20131224/3 (Accessed: 3 December 2016).

Wes Anderson’s use of colour

Throughout my research for this blog, I saw commonality between authors indicating that the correct use of colour is to aid the story, many motion pictures cited as examples were demonstrating a system with colour use where a colour decision was made because an audience associates it with meaning a certain thing, perhaps we’re in a peaceful situation and green is present or a death situation and surrounded by purple.

What stuck me about Wes Anderson’s work was how it doesn’t on the surface appear to follow that kind of theory, in Anderson’s work we see that his colours almost juxtapose the meaning in the scene. The grimmest of scenes are flooded with bright colour, yet his work is so pleasing to the eye. The whimsical world he creates is often so drab and normal contextually however combined with the fantastical colours we see a different life to the text.

Above are clips from Andrés Peña’s video: https://vimeo.com/182987900

The clips I’ve highlighted show how Anderson presents colour in some of his most mundane scenes and some of his most emotionally traumatic scenes, and how he carries colour schemes throughout his film. When you think of the film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, if you’ve seen the film your mind will switch to the pink hotel building. What’s interesting about the way Anderson carries colours is that it’s different from other filmmakers, when you examine the work of Maurice Noble, he spoke about separating colours to places so that an audience wouldn’t be confused as to which location you are in, Anderson certainly doesn’t abide by that rule.

In fact critics have critisied Anderson’s use of colour suggesting he does it to make his films recognisable without considering the emotion of the scene at hand, however there are many more texts presenting an opposition to that.

“Anderson writes and directs films that directly pertain to his experiences, thus utilizing color as an expression of society through his personal lens.” (Vreeland, 2015)

“[Anderson’s] films are cinematic dollhouses: their wonder is in the perfection of their recreation of the larger world outside their frames” (Austerlitz, 2010)

 

It is true that Anderson’s style is instantly recognisable and that it has brought him much fame and recognition, but looking at my posed question, ‘does it support the storytelling?’, no, not superficially from a realist point of view. However when we look deeper at the story and its connections to Anderson’s life we actually see that his colour choices tell more of a story about his upbringing and about his choice of writing in the film, the majority of films Anderson directed, he also had a large part in writing. And in my opinion having a style so bold and recognisable, essentially breaking the conventional rules is an extremely good move from an artistic view point.

 

Peña, A. (2016) Wes Anderson / color. Available at: https://vimeo.com/182987900 (Accessed: 3 December 2016).

Austerlitz, S. (2012). Another fi ne mess: A history of American fi lm comedy. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press.

Vreeland, V.A. (2015) ‘Color theory and social structure in the films of Wes Anderson’, Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 6(2).

Polson, T., Noble, M. and Jones, C. (2013) The noble approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of animation design. Thousand Oaks, CA, United States: Chronicle Books.

Blue in ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ (2013)

A film I’ve come across that uses colour in a similar way to ‘Her’ is Abdellatif Kechiche’s ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’, like Jonze’s ‘Her’, ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ uses the colour blue in someway in every frame, it cleverly tells of the emotional arc of two lead characters by using the amount of blue sparingly, with little saturation, when their relationship is falling apart, and by doing the complete opposite, using it wholly encompassing and fully saturated when they are most in love.

Unlike Her, where red was used surrounding one character, blue’s use is associative, it is the connection between the two leads and represents their relationship, in many ways you could say that blue actually represents love in this film, as opposed to the more expectant red. Blue through being a representation of love tells us a lot about the kind of love we are seeing, it is rebellious and itself non-conformative, just like using blue to represent it.

Which leads to a rather interesting thought, can we really use any colour to represent anything so long as it is consistent, or does this perhaps only work because blue is breaking the rules just as the relationship is?

 

Blue is the Warmest color (2013) Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Belgium.

Her (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze. USA.