Colour

Colour

 

 Within movies colour is very important for a number of reasons. Colour helps to create an atmosphere, identify specific objects, emphasise an object or even help camaflouge an object/subject. Colours tend to have emotions and assocaitions attached to them. For example the colour green has the associaiton of nature or in a cartoon the association of toxic, sick, zombies excetra. Therefore when creating a movie colour should be thought about excessively. Colour too can create atmosphere, for example in Thrillers there is usually excessive use of blues, greys and blacks. 

Within this scene form 'We need to talk about Kevin' we can see that the scenes are saturated in the colour red. The colour red has a stigma of many emotions. Some being fear, blood and danger, hence the reason for using this colour.

 

 

 

Colour history

1904:

 Colour within movies came about in 1904 and was created through very carefully painting the film frame by frame. Therefore we can understand that it was time consuming and so was not often done.George Melies was the first to release a stop motion doing this and suprsingly died penniless even after doing so. The film was called 'Voyage a Travers L'impossible' which i have embbeded below. Try to undertsand how long it would have taken to hand paint every frame and also how difficult it would have been to use the correct colour allowing the frams to flow. A movie called 'Hugo' was released after the death of George illistrating his life story.

 

 

 

 

1940-1960:

 Within this time period colour became achieveable through simply filming however it was very costly and so was not often used. Colour was best used to illistrate fantasy and black and white to illistrate reality. A famous movie which made great use of techni-colour and this format is 'The Wizrd Of Oz'. In this movie the main character Dorothy is up rooted from her home in a tornado and opens her bedroom door to find herself in the fanatical land of Oz. During the tornado the film is in a sepia tone imitating reality, when Dorothy enters Oz the film changes to colour indicating fantasy. Also notice how the use of colour is very exaggerated, emphasising fantasy, the water is a very vibrant blue and the yellow brick road is very bright.

 

 

 

 

 

1980-Now:

Nowadays the use of black and white film is not popular. Most new releases are produced in techni-colour. Only really do we see sepia or black and white film to help highlight some form of flash back or past action.