Patti Bellantoni's "If its Purple, Someones Gonna Die"

Colour plays a vital role in the whole cinematic experience. The director works closely with production designers, costume designers and also the DOP in creating a colour palette that fits the style of the film children's film rich in primary vivid colours, while thrillers adopted a colder palette (blues and greys).

"If it's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die" by Patti Bellantoni's was a book that we were suggested to read in one our lectures. Bellantoni talks about 6 main colours, each trigger a certain emotion.

Red

"Bright red is like visual caffeine. It can activate your libido, or make you aggressive, anxious, or compulsive. In fact, red can activate whatever latent passions you might bring to the table, or to the movie. Red is power. But red doesn’t come with a moral imperative. Depending on the story’s needs, red can give power to a good guy or a bad guy."

Yellow

"One of the reasons yellow is the color used for caution signs is that it’s visually aggressive. It appears to come toward you. We’ve built it into our consciousness as a cautionary color… It is also the color we identify with the sun. We associate yellow with

powerful life energy—exuberance itself."

Blue

"Blue can be a tranquil pond or a soft blanket of sadness. It is quiet and aloof. Year after year, our color investigations show that in a blue environment, people become passive and introspective."

Orange

"There were no flare-ups, no surprises. There were no in-depth insights at the critiques. The color simply supported a warm and welcoming congeniality."

Green

"Simple fact that green, in its plant manifestation, signals life itself. Green in the atmosphere, however, can signal a low-pressure system that can spawn a tornado… So green can signal health and vitality or danger and decay"

Purple

" In fact, there seemed to be no real evidence of purple’s having an effect in the physical

realm at all. The color did, however, hold a powerful sway in the realm of the noncorporal, the mystical, and even the paranormal."

Patti Bellantoni's insight to colour theory was a great starting point and found it very interesting looking at how each colour had a certain effect on the audience linking it to films was a really helpful.

Bibliography

Patti Bellantoni's. 2005. If its Purple, Someones Gonna Die. [ONLINE] Available at:https://designvisualuff.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/if-its-purple-someones-gonna-diethe-power-of-color-in-visual-storytelling-2005.pdf. [Accessed 02 February 15].

Colour Pallet

Reading Patti Bellantoni's book made me think about films I had seen that I thought had an interesting Colour Pallet

Film: Her

Director: Spike Jonze
Synopsis: Set in the future a writer forms an unlikely relationship with his operating system.  

I thought the colour Pallet in Her was incredible, the soft pastel colours help create a beautiful futuristic environment for the story to develop. The film has two conflicting themes/emotions love and loneliness, the colour pallet helps us distinguish between the two. Warm colours when Theodor is happy and cold blues when he’s not. 

Film: Drive 

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn 
Synopsis: A hollywood stunt man gets in trouble when he helped his nigbour 

The colour pallet in Drive, the dark blues, reflects the dark and gritty environment that the film is set.  Action, thriller and dark comedies films seem to have this blue colder colour Pallet while comedies, children and rom coms seem considerable warmer.

Film: 500 Days of Summer  

Director: Marc Webb
Synopsis: A former architecture falls in love with a work colleague who doesn't believe in true love.

As we see Tom and Summer go through they relationship form the first awkward encounters, to the honeymoon phase to the inevitable breakup, the colour pallet changes to considerable to reflect the emotion of the two characters.  Warmer colours when everything is going well, blue colour platte when things aren’t.

Introduction and Use of Colour (Element 1)

This morning seminar was the introduction to the Cinematography strand for production skills. The module involves us making short 5 to 10 minute film that must include the following four elements, use of colour, the sequence shot, lighting and POV techniques. We would cover these four elements in much more detail through the duration of the module.

As well as these four elements we had to create a film within  these certain parameters.

• Should only be two characters any age or any sex.
• Both need to live in the city
• Filmed in a city location and Grindleford
• One character tries to get the other character to go to the countryside (Grindleford)
• Dialogue or sound should be minimal
• Can be any genre.
• Doesn’t have to follow a liner narrative.

At first glance of the brief, my first initial thought where all about a stalker but I think that’s a route that a lot of people would chose. While I’ve been at university I’ve always wanted to create a dark comedy, I think these parameters do limit some of our creative freedom but I’m still excited to create and develop a short film that fit within these parameters.

After looking at the brief we then looked at the first technical element, the use of colour.  Colour can be used to communicate information to the audience as well as evoke emotion through mise en scene and/or dress code. 

• Red: passion, love, desire, as well as danger and anger
• Blue: tranquility, cold, peace, power
• Green: jealously, greed, as well as safety, compassion, unity.
• Yellow: Joy, happiness, energy.

We then looked at a website called movies in colour, where they take stills from films then add a colour palette. I found this really interesting it was a great visual tool to see what colours made up each shot. 

Canon XF305

During the session we where introduced to the main camera we would be using this semester the Canon XF305. I haven't used the camera and didn't really find the introduction very useful, i had never used the camera before and would have liked to use the last 30 minutes using the camera instead of just looking at it. However i have planned to book out the camera in my free time just sos i can get a little bit more familiar with it. 

Bibliography

http://moviesincolor.com