- Hey, what's up guys?
Kris Truini here for
Kriscoart Productions.
Welcome to Episode Two
of Get the Film Look.
Today, we are talking about color.
(dramatic music)
We see color every day.
Colors can be used to sell things to us,
to make us feel a certain way
and guide our eyes in ways
that we not even consciously notice.
This is why, as a visual storyteller,
it is extremely important
to understand color
and all the different ways that
it can be used as a storytelling device.
Used the right way, color
can define your film,
and in some cases it can even
progress the story on its own.
There's a ton that can be said about color
and this video will probably
just scratch the surface,
but, for today, we're gonna
be covering the following.
Color schemes and
establishing a color palette.
The quality of color and how you use it
to add graphic weight which, on its own,
is something that we will
also be talking about today.
We're gonna see how
value, hue and saturation
can help us establish a tone,
and we're probably just
gonna scratch the surface,
but all this stuff is
gonna be super interesting,
and it might be even
just an open door for you
to want to explore more on your own.
(light, cheerful music)
Now, if this your first time
on this channel, this
is a filmmaking channel,
but don't worry, if you come from
any other artistic background,
you still follow along,
because these color theory concepts
that we're gonna be exploring today
can be applied to pretty
much any visual art form.
If you've ever seen any
of this guy's videos,
you'll know that he always
starts his video by showing you
and naming every color
that he's going to use.
- Tell ya what, let's start
out today and have 'em
run all the colors across the screen
that you need to paint along with me.
And I think we'll just do
a happy little picture.
- That is his color palette.
Those are the only colors he'll need
to create an image with the
lighting and mood that he wants.
Now, if you don't know who this man is,
fix that, his name is Bob Ross,
and you can find his stuff
on YouTube and Netflix,
and it is just, I mean
the man is just like
a loving, heart-warming,
amazingly talented person.
He passed away, unfortunately.
All right, I am digressing way too much,
but the point that I'm
trying to make is that,
just like a painter, you want to make
conscious decisions of
your choice of color.
So, how do we come up with
an effective color palette?
Well that is where color theory comes in.
The basic run down is this.
You have some colors
that go well together,
and some that don't.
Now, typically, you want the
colors to go well together.
You want the colors to harmonize
and you want to create a pleasing image.
But, a lot of times, there are
a ton of exceptions to that.
I mean, you can create
discord within colors
to bring attention to a
certain part of your image,
a certain object, create tension,
but for now, let's just focus
on some basic color schemes
of just some combinations
that have worked well
and that work well with audiences
and people find them pleasing to look at.
Now, before jumping into that,
I kinda need to mention
what the color wheel is.
A color wheel is pretty much composed
of your three primary colors,
which is yellow, red and blue,
and then you can mix
those together to create
secondary colors and
then you can mix those
secondary colors with the primary colors
to make even more colors and
you got a full color wheel.
(dinging)
None of that really matters for what
we're tryin' to do, but it's good to know
because we're gonna be referencing
back to this quite a bit.
So now that we have this color wheel,
let's break down the colors individually.
Now the first piece of information
that we can look at in a color is the hue.
Now, hue is pretty much what we talk about
when we talk about
colors most of the time,
so when we're saying blue,
when we're saying red,
that is the hue of the color.
So, I guess it's just
another word for color.
But not really.
I hope I'm not gonna make this confusing,
because it's really not.
Saturation is pretty much
how vibrant that color is,
how far from being washed out white it is,
so fully saturated color
is something like that,
and a less saturated color
is something like that.
And then you have your value,
which is essentially how bright it is.
This might have different terms,
you might have already seen these terms
in color grading and color correct,
but, essentially, that's
all you have to know.
Hue is pretty much what color it is.
Value is how bright, how
luminant is that color?
And saturation is pretty much how vibrant,
how rich is that color?
So, the first color scheme that we're
gonna be taking a look
at is complementary.
Now, a complementary color scheme
is essentially whenever
you pick two colors
on the color wheel that
are opposite of each other.
And this creates for a very nice contrast,
it creates a nice pleasing image.
It's used a ton, in a ton of movies,
it's probably one of the most typical
color combinations that you will find.
Blockbuster movies love this.
Transformer, all the Transformer movies
are such a obvious example
of complementary colors.
I mean, you have the opposite
orange and teal look,
which is very popular blockbuster look.
But, that's pretty much the main thing
about complementary colors.
You have two colors that
complement each other
by being opposite on the color wheel
and that creates contrast and that usually
creates for a beautiful image.
Now, the thing about color schemes is that
you usually want to pick a dominant color
and then a secondary color
to support your scene,
and maybe, like, a third
color to highlight,
so keep that in mind
because, whenever you're
picking colors, choosing a
color scheme or a color palette,
you don't have to spread out every color
evenly in your shot.
There could be a dominant color that's
more prevalent in your shot, it could be
your overall background color,
and then you can have your subject
which is a different color.
But, you can see how
there is a dominant color
and then there is a color
that supports the scene.
So, you can use this
effectively to highlight
certain things, to bring
certain things to attention.
The next color scheme
that I want to talk about
is analogous, and this is
found oftentimes in nature,
so, if you have a visual piece
that tries to portray nature,
they're gonna use analogous colors a lot.
And this is just a pleasing
color combination to the eye.
It's very relaxing, it's usually
very comfortable to look at.
And these are colors,
these are a combination
of, like, three or four colors
that are actually next to
each other in the color wheel.
So, that's pretty much how you
pick out an analogous color.
Next is monochromatic which, I think,
is a very interesting color scheme.
It's not a combination of colors,
but rather just one single color
out of the color wheel that you can pick
and that's how you can
create a monochromatic image.
That is pretty much an image that
doesn't have other colors,
it's just predominantly just one color,
and you'd be surprised how much
you can do with just one color.
Now, there are other color schemes,
such as triadic colors, which
pretty much picks colors
that are equally distance
within the color wheel.
So, if geometry is your thing,
if you put an equilategral, equilateral,
equilateral, equilateral triangle
in the center of the color wheel,
and you rotate that wherever you want,
and you're pretty much always
gonna get a combination
of colors that fits within
the triadic color scheme.
So, to make things a little bit easier,
there is a great tool from
Adobe called Adobe Color.
It's just a website, you can go to it,
they have a color wheel,
you have different
color scheme combinations,
you can move things around,
it's very responsive
and you can play around
with different things and
just get a different feel
of different color palettes
and just experiment with color.
So, it's definitely a great
way to start and experiment,
and even establishing
some looks through there.
Another great thing that Adobe has done
is created an app called Adobe Capture.
If you download that on your phone,
you can actually go around
and take pictures of things
and it will tell you the
predominant colors in that image.
So, if you see something like a design
or something in nature, or
just colors anywhere in life,
that you find inspirational,
you can actually capture them.
You can take a picture of them,
it will save all of the
color data in there,
it will create a color
palette based on that picture.
It's just great.
It's amazing, you can
upload it to the Cloud
and it's there on all of your devices.
So, those are two things
that I really recommend
you guys check out to just
further understand color theory.
So, two very powerful tools.
I thought I'd mention them.
I'm gonna leave a link to
them in the description
as well as to other
sources that I've gathered,
I've gathered some
articles and a few videos
from some fellow creators
here on YouTube that have done
an excellent job at explaining
color theory even more.
So, now that we have
all of this information,
we know what colors to use, we can create
a color palette of colors that we like,
how do we actually choose them
to serve the story that
we're tryin' to tell?
Colors can have a huge
impact on your audience,
and this is where the
psychology of colors come in.
(dramatic music)
Now, within our human nature, we actually
emotionally respond differently
to different colors.
I don't know why that is.
I don't know if it was
some kind of an instinctual
trait that was given to us to survive.
I have no idea, but it is there,
so we should use it to our advantage.
For example, red.
Red is probably the color that we
respond to the most emotionally.
It actually is the most striking
color, of all the colors,
as far as the way that we psychologically
internalize that color.
Where red can be portraying passion,
can be portraying violence and gore
and it's usually associated with
something that has a very strong meaning.
Something that's very striking.
And, you can use this to highlight
certain things in your image
to portray certain omens.
There's just a ton of different ways
that you can use very
strong colors like this one
to really draw your audience's eyes
to a certain part of your image.
Now, I would love to break
down every single color
and talk about and explore
the meanings of each color,
but for the sake of time,
I am not going to do that,
but maybe there will be a video comin' up.
I don't know, let me know.
Let me know if you want to see that,
and I will make that for you guys,
but just know that every color
has its own significance,
we respond to it a certain way,
and culturally, we are
actually indoctrinated
to respond to colors a certain way.
And this can vary culture to culture.
I mean, western culture can associate
different meanings to certain colors
than what, I don't know,
let's say China does,
and, I mean, we see this
in The Last Emperor,
which is an amazing movie
and it was DPed by Vittorio Storaro.
And I actually made a video
about Storaro and his choice of color.
You can check it out in the notes.
And, I'm probably gonna
make videos about Storaro.
I mean, his body of work is incredible.
Definitely check it out for inspiration
on how color can be used in movies
and how it can further a story.
(dramatic music)
Another way that you can use colors
as a storytelling device is using them
to associate a certain meaning,
a certain part of your story,
a certain character to a color.
So, if you have certain scenes
that revolve around that character,
that might affect that character somehow,
you can maybe foreshadow
it a little bit with
a little splash of whatever
color represents that character.
I mean, that's just one way of using it,
but you can see how you
can really play with that.
I mean, another way of doing it
would be maybe having a certain color
associated with that character
and maybe that color transitions
into a different color, and that could,
that could highlight even further
a certain character arc that
the character is experiencing
at that point in time in the story.
So, you can take it all kinds
of different directions,
but really what I want you to see here
is that there are so many powerful ways
that you can use color to
really enhance your story,
to really support and just
drive the story further.
(dramatic music)
Hoo, all right, there is so
much more to say about color
and I wish I could in this video,
but it's getting quite long,
so I think I'm gonna end it here.
I hope you learned
something about color theory
and colors, and all the different ways
that you can use them to improve
your visual storytelling.
If you did enjoy this video,
please give it a like,
and feel free to submit any kind of work
that you create following
these principles.
You can tweet 'em at me, here is
my Twitter account, @KRISCOART.
All right guys, thank
you so much for watching.
My name is Kris Truini
for Kriscoart Productions,
and I will see you next time.
(dramatic music)
I am so close to being
done with the video.
It is almost 5:00 in the morning.
Just tryin' to upload this in time.
Startin' to use Snapchat a bit more.
So, if you guys want to just see
some behind the scenes stuff,
and see what I'm doing throughout the day,
follow me @KRISCOART.
