A part of week 4’s exercises tasked us with taking colour scripts from existing animated stills and analysing their effect on the audience; in terms of atmosphere. The video lectures by Sarah Dargie were incredibly interesting on this subject; it explained how subconsciously we recognise emotion through colour (for example; red communicates danger or passion, etc) and how we perceive an image based on the colour composition (for example; primary colours indicate playfulness, complimentary suggests conflict, and analogous can portray harmony).
For the colour study task I chose 3 films I really love, Kill Bill (the animated sequence from volume 1), Corpse Bride and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
When exploring the use of colour in the Kill Bill scene, I believe the most notable attribute is the muted primary colour scheme. O-Ren’s skin is of a yellowish hue, allowing the vibrant red blood to stand out brightly, and the blue background helps create a visually pleasing still image. Although primary colour schemes are seen as mostly playful and childish, the Kill Bill scene contrasts this with ridiculous violence (O-Ren herself is a child in the sequence, adding more contrast to the violent, adult themes of the scene).
In Corpse Bride the colours are vibrant and exuberant, the neon green lighting almost sickly and unnerving against the deep purples of the shadows; helping portray the scene’s theme of extraordinary and unnatural whimsy. In this scene the complementary colour scheme is used to be both creepy (green and purple are staple colours of Halloween for example) and playful.
I thought it was interesting to see Nausicaä’s contrasting colour palettes, any time we see the toxic jungle the foliage is lush and the colours are mostly analogous blue hues, giving a sense of calm and balance, even crawling with giant insects the toxic jungle appears to have an organised system. Yet elsewhere in the world, the settlements made by man (aside from the valley of the wind) are dull and on the surface very monochromatic, clearly showing there is no life to be found in the cities, even before we see the destroyed city of Pejite we have the sense that this dystopian world is lifeless, dreary and barren, the vast plains of sand and clouds of brown dust portray this early on.
I found these studies to be fascinating and very helpful for when I began the other tasks, it is interesting how colour itself can wordlessly influence our views of the world and even our own emotion upon seeing the scenes.
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