Color – Making Movies Stand Out

Color is a fun yet important setting consideration when deciding how to film a movie.  Color can emphasize all kinds of moods from blue for sadness to red for rage.  “The Matrix” uses a green color palette for coding and a futuristic/tech look.   Movies sometimes just highlight one character by painting it a different color from the rest like the red coated girl in Schindler’s List.  She represents innocence and from the rest of the black and white film, her death  is highlighted this way to show war deaths as meaningless.

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Schindler’s List” by elycefeliz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

To highlight the main character, certain movies will also highlight the main character with certain colors.  In “The Mask” Jim Carry’s Character is always seen in green makeup with a yellow suit making it easy to follow the antics going on, and “Kill Bill” put Uma Thurman in an iconic yellow jumpsuit.  “Mad Max beyond Thunderdome” sticks to mostly machine dark colors on top of the desert sand color behind.

Most interesting of all, “Dick Tracy” stuck to a 7 color-palette scheme in the making of the movie. The director and cinematographer went as far as painting the buildings, choosing the cars, and making the suits based on the scheme of primarily red, green, fuscia, orange, cyan, blue, and yellow.  The saturation brings more drama and the audience is not used to seeing a fixed pallete used in that manner, I highly recommend seeing it as a treat to the eye.

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