Cinematography is such an important part of the filmmaking process it’s a shock that more independent filmmakers don’t spend the necessary time to fully understanding the artistic and technical components of color that aid in the construction of breathtaking footage. Lights Film School recommends that our students read books on painting and photography to better understanding the expressionist period, the impressionist period, lines, shapes, composition, isolation and last but not least color and color theory.
This blog post will focus on color and the benefits of color simplicity within a frame. However, in the future we hope to add additional blog posts covering the wide spectrum of other topics mentioned above.
Color simplicity is the process of limiting the array of colors that make it into the 4 walls of your image. Photographers spend a lot of time trying to find color simplicity in our visually chaotic world. Filmmakers have an even bigger challenge because our cameras move, which means the colors in our backgrounds and foregrounds will always be changing.
That being said, many filmmakers have found great compositional strategies that allow them to keep their frames organized from a color standpoint. The Cohen Brother’s last film “No Country For Old Men” started out with a breathtaking montage of landscape images that used a minimalist approach to color. In fact, the entire film was very well thought out from a color theory standpoint.
How to compose for color simplicity
To compose your footage for color simplicity you really need to understand what the colors “say” symbolically and how they interact together. Please look at the color wheel below.
Analogous colors are colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. These colors, when they appear together, provide a smooth and continuous tone. Colors that are located opposite to one another on the color wheel are complementary colors. When complementary colors appear next to each other they provide more of a dramatic and high contrast look.
Neither color strategy is correct over the other, but it is easy to both see and feel that the response from the viewer will be much different when they look at each image. For example, look at the following two photographs.
Example of Analogous Colors
Example of Complementary Colors
This is how you color simplify an image. You simply limit the assortment of colors that make it into your footage which allows you to control both the mood and tone of the scene as well as provide color symbolism.
To help enhance color simplicity you might also want to play around with color balance and color highlights. Look at the following photograph for example. Notice the image is predominately cool (blue) with only a warm (orange) highlight. Playing with color highlights is a great way to add interesting color components to your film footage.
If you’re a filmmaker, understanding color, color theory, color psychology, color simplicity and color balance is a must in order to be able to effectively set the tone of your scene as well as isolate your main areas of interest. Distracting colors, just as much as distracting objects, add unnecessary visual confusion and clutter to a scene. By simplifying your colors you help isolate the more important areas of your footage.
Happy Filmmaking!
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