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Colour is elusive

 In the book 'The Art of Pixar' Amid Amidi describes how colour is elusive and the mutability of a single colour with its vast amount of possible hues, shades, tints and tones is perceived in relation to its context and its neighboring colours. It is for this reason colour is so effective for expressing mood and emotion in so many different ways. Colours are so powerful that their slightest change can express many different things form the same colour. The colour blue can be interpreted as associated with ice and cold but in contrast can also portray the hottest point of a flame. The colour red can evoke emotions of lust and love and at the same time draw connotations of blood and gore. It is the quality and skills artists at Pixar posses that they have the utmost colour understanding and can create images to directly evoke particular emotions from an audience to set the emotional arcs within a film. The psychology behind colour theory is amazing. I have included a page from the book, 'The Art of Pixar' because I find looking at a colour script so broadly really shows off the use of colour in such an appealing way.

Is your red the same as my blue?

 Well I very much doubt it you say? On a serious note however, scientists seems to have 

discovered that in fact our eyes won't receive colour in the same way as someone else. The 

thinking that we all see colour in the same way is from the idea that a humans brain has a 

default way of processing light that hits the cells in our eyes, however, Jay Neitz a colour vision scientist suspects otherwise, "recent experiments lead us down a road to the idea that

we don't all see the same colors". The scientist see it possible that one persons green could well be another persons yellow, although they do state that a persons feeling to their version of the colour would not change despite the possibility of the colour being a completely different interpretation compared to someone else.

 Considering this is mind it is amazing to think of all the possible variations of colour in day today life. What if the skies were red (or at least our own version of red) or the grass was blue. Such alterations would seem like we were on a completely different planet. Maybe some people are!

The BBC filmed people explaining their favorite colours. I found this interesting just thinking about how individuals are drawn to certain colours over others.

A neuro scientist, conducted an experiment to see how peoples perception of colour differed. The volunteers took part in eight different experiments veering from whether colour had an impact on time passing, to looking at how people made different colour patterns in mosaics, to what emotions people associated with different colours - red for anger, blue for tranquillity? Beau found that colour really can impact the passing of time.

Volunteers were asked to stand in three different colour pods bathed in either blue, red or white light, and Beau found that blue light made time pass more quickly and red seemed to slow it down.

"Red makes us highly aware of our environment and so time slows down in your mind".

I can't get no..saturation!

 Animated films rely heavily upon their use of colour to convey focus, mood and appeal amoung many other things. In some ways the colour can be exaggerated to the point of extreme in such ways that would never normally occur in reality but is important in conveying ideas in the film.

 The term saturation comes into play when measuring the amount of colour being reflected. It is determined by a combination of light intensity its distribution across the spectrum of different wavelengths.

 In the film Ratatouille by Pixar, there is excellent use of saturation and colour theory to suit particular environments and portray varied feelings about particular scenes in the film. You've got the contrast in use of saturation between the rat world and the human world. On a deeper level the colour helps this idea to distinguish two different worlds and connotations associated with both. 

 Sharon Calahan, ... at Pixar animation studios talks about colouring and lighting the film, 'The highlights could go white, but we didn't want the mid-tones and shadows to read grey, so we added small amounts of low intensity saturated illumination to shift the hue. In the kitchen, since its a warmer human world environment, we added a low intensity orange light to shift the hue warmer, we tinted the darks more than the lights since we wanted to keep the whites closer to white and get the rich colours in the darks.' It goes to show hwo much stauration is thought about in film and the effects it has on minuscule proportions of the film.

 In the image above you can see great use of colour and saturation. It really helps describe the lusciousness of the food and the delicacy. The red-purple of the grapes and the yellow of the cheese help convey richness. When compared to a street shot of Paris we can see how saturation as varied throughout the film.

 Look how the saturation of the city is muted yet still represent so much colour range. In contrast a completely different motive to the full on colour of the food scene, 'since we had a restrained palette, it was really important to us that the colours feel rich even though they were not particularly saturated. we wanted the neutral tones to not feel muddy. The trick was for us to make sure the colours were getting more saturated as they were getting darker.' Calahan explains how Pixar worked to reach the beautiful use of colour in the film.

 Ratatouille is a really inspiring film colour wise as are many of the Pixar films but one of the thing I really love about it is how such variation is engineered to create a specific look. There's something about the colour palette in the above shot that just shouts 'Paris'. It goes to show the use of saturation is such a powerful tool.

Blorange

 In the world of film and art it has become an ever more popular combination of complimentary colours, to use blue and orange, hence 'blorange'. Throughout my time at university, from consuming vast amounts of different art works and film, this combination continues to be used. Some lecturers would encourage the use of blorange and all the power it holds until in my recent colour theory lecture I was made to realise that its incredibly over used and cliche. While in the process of learning the vast amount of colour combinations and their uses it encouraged me to think of colour in a more experimental way and to use other colours to their advantage. There are other complimentary colours which could do the same thing as blorange but convey new and unusual moods. I mean its probably been done before but why not vellow instead? The mixture of violet and yellow is much less widely seen in comparison to blorange but no less potential. How about some some gred?

'My, your colours are all arms and legs, there's just no proportion!'

 Colour proportion is something new to me from my colour theory classes. I never before thought about how the quantities of particular colours could affect its perception. Complementary colours require a harmonious amount of each to work well together. It is general that yellow to violet works 3:1, orange and blue works 2:1 and red and green work 1:1.



 Harmony between these colours is visually pleasing but unproportionate colours will be noticeably unattractive. The use of colour proportion along will be useful for me in my own work. It is another tool for an artist to engineer the audience to how they want. In the examples below, a good understanding of colour proportion is demonstrated.

'I Broke My Colour'

 I recently experimented with broken colours in a colour theory lecture. Mixing two complementary colours together can be very boring, however can be useful for creating compositions with balanced saturation.

 When later looking into broken colours I came across alot of impressionist paintings which use a technique of breaking colours. This is not the same thing as a broken colour palette but more a technique used to create the illusion of colour mixing, 'optical mixing'. Instead of mixing a yellow and a red to create orange, impressionists would paint a dab of yellow and a separate dab of red next to the yellow. This 'optical mixing' also creates an orange, it is likely to be intense that mixing the colours normally. Claude Monet was one artist who contributed to this technique. 



 The painting above by Monet demonstrates this technique. If we were to go even closer to the image it would be more apparent but even still you can see the separate brush strokes used to create the mixing of colour. Below demonstrates how this technique works up close.