Investigation 11/3: Color In Film

Color is an important concept to make use of within film. A filmmaker can incorporate color into their work in order to establish a desired tone within a scene or over the course of the entire work. This permits the audience to think deeper thoughts and feel deeper feelings about the film. I have chosen to investigate color in order to be able to invoke feeling within the audience as well as create visually interesting scenes.

Emotional Use Of Color

It is commonly accepted that particular colors can evoke certain feelings within humans. With this knowledge, artists work to incorporate color into their art with the intention of making their audience feel in their desired way. Logos, films, paintings, and photographs are all examples of things artists have manipulated color within to influence their audience. While each color can be debated to evoke a particular set of emotions, most colors have an accepted group of emotions in which they appeal to. This image showcases a selection of emotions that each color typically appeals to. Using this as a reference, a filmmaker can, for example, decide to incorporate the color yellow into an opening scene about a character's childhood or integrate the color red to demonstrate the love between two characters.

I had previously attempted to make use of color to evoke emotions in a film created during my freshman year. While I hadn't made use of this concept as deeply as I intend to now, this film gives a simple look of how it can be used.

General Use of Color

Other than emotionally, color is used within film in order to add depth to the visuals shown on scene and create contrast between characters and scenes. While color is used with the intention of instilling emotion, it is important for the filmmaker to not overwhelm a scene or shot with color. Setting a scene in a green jungle and having the characters wear green makes it difficult to contrast the characters and the world around them. Using a variety of colors for different components gives each component it's own identity. An example of this can be seen within the space battles of Star Wars. In these scenes, despite each ship being primarily grey, the other colored details work to contrast both the rebels and the empire. The empire's ships are accented with black and shoot green lasers while the rebel's ships are accented with red and yellow details and shoot red lasers. These simple color differences help show the audience who is who within the scene without having to outright say.