How do those high-scoring science fiction movies “make color”?
Let's look at the picture first.
▲ Picture from: Associated Press
After reading what was the first word that appeared in your mind, I took this picture and asked several friends for their first impressions. Coincidentally, the answers they gave were all movies.
What a science fiction movie, the special effects are so realistic, I recommend it to me.
Although many people hope that this is only a movie special effect, the answer is no. In fact, this picture is a live shot of the California mountain fire.
The reason why this wildfire scene picture can be mistaken for movie special effects is related to the large and continuous orange in the picture. This kind of peculiar scene composed of the same color is not seen by most people in daily life. The film creates a scene that does not exist in life through color, and guides the audience to immerse themselves in the stories told by science fiction movies.
Movies use color as a visual element, which not only affects our emotions, but also subtly affects our cognition.
If you don’t believe me, now you think about the picture corresponding to the word "end of the world." Is the result similar to the movie you have seen?
Science fiction movies use color to answer a non-existent question
What the future should be like, what the end of the world should be like, what should alien environments and aliens be like…
This series of questions must be answered by every sci-fi movie screenwriter and director. For sci-fi movies, if the basic plot cannot be convinced by the audience, not many people are willing to pay for tickets to enter the cinema, or even Unwilling to click on the movie on the video platform.
Just like a movie camera will always deliberately imitate the movement of people’s sight, its purpose is to hide the existence of the camera and make the audience believe that this is a real environment. The audiovisual content displayed by the movie frame is a real story and is immersed. among them.
Ordinary movies can also build scenes based on the real world, so that the audience will not feel a sense of isolation.
But science fiction movies often set the story in the future, end of the world and other times. No one knows what the environment was like at that time. Science fiction film directors don't know, but they used the visual element of color to complete the scene construction, which is convincing enough.
This is because color, as a visual element, will have an impact on people's emotions, especially when a large number of colors appear in the same scene. Pink usually associates people with innocence, red is passion, and yellow is desolate or sick.
▲The main color of "Mad Max 4 Fury Road" is yellow
The plot of the movie "Crazy Max 4 Fury Road" is set in a future world with a nuclear explosion, and the film uses a large number of desert-based yellow as the main color, giving people a sense of desolation and loneliness , Increasing the credibility of this plot setting.
In the classic sci-fi movie "Alien" series, black has become the main color of the movie. On the one hand, black is often associated with mystery and unknown, in line with the space scene set by the plot, and on the other hand, to highlight the alien monsters in the film. The use of a large number of black scenes can also arouse people’s fear and immersion in the movie.
"Avatar" uses blue and purple as the main colors of the movie. Generally speaking, blue and purple give people a mysterious and illusory feeling, which is in line with the alien planet and alien civilization set by the movie plot. It is mysterious to humans.
In addition to the soundtrack of the movie, the movie uses visual colors to connect the audience's emotions and echoes in the plot setting. It creates one visual spectacle after another to attract the audience and bring freshness, while also allowing the audience to better immerse themselves in science fiction. In the "dreamland" created by the movie.
Of course, the application of colors is also grounded. They often come from our daily life experience. For example, the Gobi Desert and desert are often sparsely populated and scarce in resources. Yellow is the main color of the Gobi Desert and desert, and it is naturally easy. Let people associate yellow with the word desolation.
Life experience will spread more and more widely according to people's migration and circulation, and eventually become our common culture. It is based on the recognition of culture that makes us associate colors and affect our emotions.
The influence of color on people's emotions has formed a special subject- color psychology in the continuous research and development. In addition to movies, brand packaging design, clothing, etc., all are the application fields of color psychology. Color affects emotions and completes sales.
Film is an audiovisual art expressed by the author. Although it has only a history of more than 100 years, the author has been very rich in the content and method of expression. In addition to using color to influence emotions, it helps to push the audience into the "dreamland" described in the film. , Color can also be a tool of narrative variation, and even the film industry has deduced a special three-color rule.
There are many more applications of color by film directors.
Use color to intensify drama conflict
Colors can affect people's emotions, and the conflicts and contrasts of different colors are often a sublimation of the plot and concept of a movie, serving the narrative. The 2017 high-scoring movie "Big Buddha Plus", the whole film is basically black and white, only the two protagonists use computers to watch the content of the boss's driving recorder, the video screen turns to color.
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After seeing the color picture recorded by the driving recorder, the two protagonists couldn't help but sigh:
The world of the rich is indeed colorful.
This sentence is also the most widely spread and most talked-about line in the entire film. The director used black and white and color to show the difference between the rich (the boss) and the poor (the two protagonists), which gave the audience a strong visual impact, and also emphasized the class difference between the poor and the rich.
In the high-scoring movie "Schindler's List", black and white are also dominated, and only the little girl is dressed in red. The conspicuous little red in the blockbuster black and white is hard to ignore. This cute little girl symbolizes hope in the film, but in the end it ends with a corpse on a corpse truck.
Such a strong impact on the picture well expresses the theme of "Schindler's List"-anti-war.
In addition to deepening the theme and allowing the audience to empathize with the movie, the alternation of colors often plays a metaphorical role in the movie, suggesting to the audience the development of the plot and the emotions of the characters, especially in some suspenseful movies, the frequency of appearance It will be even higher. "Hero", the milestone of my country's blockbuster film era, is a movie case.
The big scenes and visual spectacles are the impression many people have of the blockbuster movie "Hero", but in fact, the color elements in the film are equally important. "Hero" uses red, blue, white, black and other colors to divide the movie into segments, implying that the story of "Assassination of King Qin" is told by different people, and each person's narration method and character psychology are also different.
In the film, black means reality. The assassin played by Jet Li talks with King Qin without a name. At the same time, black is also a demonstration of the atmosphere of Qin Dynasty's killing and martial arts.
When the story is told without name, the main color of the picture turns to red, and emotions such as erotic desire and jealousy become the theme of the story. When the story is told by King Qin, the main color of the picture turns to blue again, reflecting the king of Qin as a monarch. Calm down, when the story of "Assassin Qin" was finally told, the tone of the picture turned to white, which symbolized purity and implied that this was the truest version of the story.
In the three stories told, the narrator’s mentality and position are different. Some people support Assassin, while others oppose it. After the story is reversed many times, the color is actually a "reminder" given by the director.
As the most intuitive visual element of a movie (video), color can be used as an environmental element to guide the audience's emotions, or as a narrative element to show the psychological state of the characters and the trend of the plot, and strengthen the drama conflict.
As a content medium, video is popular today, it also affects our perception of things.
Movies are a reflection of our daily experience and at the same time affect our perception
Professor Dai Jinhua, a professor in the Chinese Department of Peking University, once told a movie-related experimental story.
Once, a documentary director screened a documentary filmed by himself to the primitive tribal people who had never been exposed to modern culture. The result surprised the director. People in the primitive tribe were actively discussing a chicken, but he did not find any chicken in the documentary.
As the director and editor of the film, he has watched the content of the documentary countless times, and all the content has long been familiar to him, but he did not realize that he had taken a chicken. In desperation, the director could only choose frame by frame to watch the documentary carefully, and finally found the chicken in a small corner of the screen.
The reason behind this is that most people subconsciously pay attention to the most common things in their lives and cultural traditions when watching movies. The primitive tribes actively discuss this chicken because it is very common in their lives.
Movies are a reflection of our daily life experience. Everyone can see the content corresponding to their own life experiences in movies. There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people.
At the same time, film creators use people's common life experience and cultural traditions to put color, music and other elements into the film, creating one after another color spectacle, attracting the audience to immerse themselves in it. These movie spectacles have been spread in large quantities and have been integrated into the life experience of the audience. They have become a new culture and affect the perception of the audience. For example, seeing the endless orange fire, the first thing that comes to mind is the movie special effects.
The plots in sci-fi movies also indicate the direction of life. True wireless headsets are not exactly the products imagined in earlier sci-fi movies.
Movies are a reflection of our daily experience and at the same time affect our perceptions.
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