The “color key” or “color script” is a crucial tool in the creation of animations. It is a series of color illustrations that represent the different scenes of the animation, helping to establish the color palette, emotional tone and atmosphere of the story. It also provides visual guidance to the lighting designers and production team, allowing them to maintain aesthetic and narrative consistency throughout the project. In turn, it helps directors communicate their creative vision so that the lighting artist understands the color palette and atmosphere they want to achieve, and ensures that the lighting and colors match the desired mood of each scene. This enables the lighting artist to set the intensity of light, shadows, reflections and other aspects of lighting, and make informed decisions on how to light each shot to properly convey emotion, mood and narrative.
Let’s look at an example from “Coraline”.
| CORALINE AND ITS CONTRAST BETWEEN WORLDS Here are two scenes from the movie “Coraline”, I have a video on my Youtube channel “Coloring frames” (in spanish) doing a deeper analysis on the art direction of this movie. The main character enters an alternate world that seems perfect at first, but then reveals itself to be dark and dangerous. The film uses a more muted and cooler color palette to represent the real world and the more “boring” parts of the story. Gray and blue tones predominate, creating a sense of monotony and normality. Although in this specific scene, Coraline wears yellow to give a sense that she is a happier character than the rest of the characters in that world, thus giving a feeling as if she does not belong to that world. |
On the other hand, when Coraline explores the alternate world, which initially seems exciting and full of wonders, the color palette changes drastically. This is where the “color key” is applied with more vivid and saturated colors. Warm tones such as red, orange and yellow dominate this world, creating a sense of enchantment and excitement. We can clearly see the difference between the two worlds.
PRODUCTION EXAMPLE
Here we see an example of a shot that our mentor Iván Manuel Benítez Sanz made during his time working on “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse”, we see the intentionality of the key color, and how this is interpreted and taken to 3D, the color palette may change slightly as well as the shadows, being very full and too overloaded the BG was desaturated and blurred to focus attention on Miles, but in this case the directionality of the lights remained as indicated in the key color.
If you also want to learn how to analyze a key color or a reference to be able to light an animation shot, you can book your place today for our lighting mentorships or purchase the 3D lighting course. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to receive news from the world of animation and film!