Color is one of the first things an audience feels and one of the last things it notices. In film it is planned long before the shoot: many animation studios draw a color script, a strip of small frames that shows how the palette changes from scene to scene, so the emotion of the story can be read from color alone. Then, in post-production, the color grade finishes the job, shot by shot. Here is how that worked on a film of mine.
Mute Fala, Vô!, turn off the subtitles, and you can still follow most of it. Part of that is the acting. A big part is color. The film has two worlds, and they never share a palette.
Two worlds, two palettes
The grandson's living room is digital and cold: neutral colors, little saturation, smooth surfaces and no window. It is the room of someone who has been inside for too long, with a screen for company. The grandfather's cabin is the opposite: wood, warm light, dense color, a little grain and a slight chromatic aberration, like an old film. One is the present. The other is memory.
Materials help as much as hue. Wood feels welcoming; metal and smooth surfaces feel tense. Books on color psychology say warm tones tend to feel happy and cold neutrals the opposite. It is a tendency, not a law, but it is a good place to start.
Color as a clock
Color also marks time. Around four minutes in, the grandson writes on the whiteboard while dates and voice messages pile up. The image starts slightly green and ends cold. Near the six minute mark, at the end of the birthday call, it happens again, more quietly: the grade goes from a cold but still saturated image, with a few paper planes on the floor, to a floor covered in planes and an image with almost no color left.
That last look is called bleach bypass. In film labs, it meant skipping part of the bleaching step and leaving silver in the image: less saturation, more contrast, darker shadows, more grain. It became popular in the sixties and seventies, and again with Saving Private Ryan (1998). Today it is a few nodes in a grading software, and it still reads as loss.
A grade in layers
I graded the film in DaVinci Resolve, where every correction is a node. The order I followed is a good habit for any project, even outside video:
- Input. Color space and noise, before any taste comes in.
- Primary. Exposure, contrast and white balance for the whole image.
- Secondary. Only one part: a face, an object, the sky.
- Look. The style of the piece: the palette, the mood.
- Finish. Grain, sharpness, the last touch of contrast.
The logic is simple: fix first, style later. A look on top of an unbalanced image is a filter. A look on top of a balanced one is a decision.
Plan color like a story
For a brand film, a campaign or a sequence of posts, the same planning works. Decide what your worlds are (before and after, problem and solution, day and night) and give each one its own palette before you open any tool. Then decide how color changes over time. A palette that slowly warms up across a launch says something no headline can.
Try it on your next piece: two palettes, one for where the story starts and one for where it ends. Then look closely at the frames in between.
This text comes from Felipe Risallah's undergraduate thesis on the production of the 3D short film Fala, Vô! (Cinema and Audiovisual, UFES, 2023). More about the film at the link.