Moho Forum

Philosophical question here...

I keep turning it over in my mind but I can't get clear...

To begin with, there isn't any question that an artist must exert discipline over his colors, for various reasons:

- you want to maintain a pleasing color harmony
- you want to draw just so much relative attention and no more to the focus of interest, using color
- you want to maintain a fundamental visual continuity throughout a production
- you generally want to convince the audience they're looking at a valid representation of reality (grass normally shouldn't be blue, seagulls normally shouldn't be green).
- you want to use color in an expressionist way, so that various colors symbolically impart certain emotions

Given that, what I'm trying to understand is the impact of collapsing your color universe down to a tiny palette, for instance a monochromatic palette of oranges, browns, and grays.

Or what if you had a movie that only used two monochromatic palettes, orange tones and blue tones?

Can you draw the audience deeper into your world by making such a strong stylistic statement, or do you distance the audience by divorcing too much from reality?

Of course, I understand this is a non-issue if you're doing raw cutout anime ala "South Park," or a lampoon such as "The Simpsons," but what if your intention as a story teller is to be serious?

First rule to colour: there is No Rule. There's only things that work within their context, and things that don't. The same amount of good and bad films is made with every colour palette between black&white and neon-rainbow.

Recently John Kricfalusi wrote some insightful posts especially about colour and backgrounds. Even if you don't share his opinion, they're worth to read. Someone put commented links to these posts at the end of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kricfalusi.

There are lots of books available about colour theory, and even more books with examples of colour combinations. Sometimes I use those preset combinations for my design work since I'm terribly bad with colour. But more often I just get some inspiration from reality or photographs. Or I browse through my comic collection for some appealing colour combinations.

It helps to have knowledge about production design, especially in bigger projects - and I will treat everything longer than two scenes as bigger project ... Some certain workflow routines greatly improve the results. I think bad production design yields much worse films than the occasional bad choice of colour. Imagine some strange colour combination for background and characters: as odd as it may be, the audience will accept it as long as it is used consistently throughout the sequence.

Hans Bacher wrote a book about production design in animation, unfortunately so far it has been published in japanese only. I'm waiting for the english edition! (http://its-a-wrap.blogspot.com/)

Hey, thanks for the informative references.

One of the blogs you mentioned is replete with storyboards from a variety of old animated productions that feature strictly controlled palettes.

The author, apparently a longtime master of production design, is named Hans Bacher. He says his book Dream Worlds will appear soon in English.

I must say that a couple of his stills involve the kind of steam loco I want to animate, but his brilliance makes me want to throw up my hands in shame:





If you go the geniuses' blog you can see these small shots in their full glory (especially because this second link fails to load an image).

http://its-a-wrap.blogspot.com/

At some point, I'd like to share some of the other comments I have been reading concerning limited color/colour palettes in live-action and animated film.

Thanks!

Hans Bacher is really really good. I've downloaded a lot of his pictures just as reference. But sometimes I notice a certain slickness in his work which I personally don't like. Because of his experience he has a solution for every problem, and his style is as fast as possible because fast problem solving is of high demand in the kind of big animation projects he works with (Disney!) I feel that this versatility leads itself to some kind of uniformity on a higher level. It is not a bad thing, it is something like a "studio style". But it would be nice to see some more personal style, at least something different from time to time.