What is color script?

A color script is a movie's color palette and animation keyframes that represent the most important and vivid emotional points of a work. They illustrate how the mood progresses throughout the movie and show the direction of the story.

Curious? Then read on. Let's discuss the topic in more detail!

The features of color writing

Color is the most important tool in any visual work. Combinations of hues in an animation help tell a story and evoke different emotions in the viewer.

Think about it: red is subconsciously associated with something challenging or even somewhat violent and dangerous. Whereas blue is associated with something melancholy and maybe even depressing.

We actually could go on and on.

And even in animation it will not be the dialog that will be expressive, it will be the color. So every production involves the creation of color scripts.
If you look at the process, it is very similar to working with storyboards. The fact that both they and others illustrate the story at the stages of its creation. They also act as a kind of demo. Neither color scripts nor storyboards strive to be neat, beautiful, and detailed.

It's just not necessary. It's superfluous. Things can change during production, and redoing the work that has already been done is too expensive for the project.

How to create a color script

Before we describe the specific steps for creating a color script, we should clarify a few important points.

It is important to understand that when working on a color script, the most important thing is that the artwork reflects the key points of the story and conveys the right emotions through color.

You can use a variety of graphic editors to create a scheme. Of course, most often it is Photoshop or GIMP, but no one forbids to try and others.

Now let's discuss the process of creating a color scheme in detail:

• Introduce important frames of the story one by one. This can be done on a canvas.
  
• Convert all images to black and white. This can be done with color correction by changing the saturation.
  
• Increase the contrast of the images using the same color correction.
  
• Analyze your pics and determine what emotion you want each image to convey. Choose the appropriate hues according to the psychology of color. We've already given you some ideas.
  
• Now it's time to tint. You need to adjust the saturation and hue.
  
• Aaand now it's time to restore the colors with a transparent brush.
  
• Repeat this process for all the frames.
  

Experiment with the shades, try different approaches. The whole process of working on the color scheme will evolve and be enriched with new shades. Changing the colors will allow you to find the shades that best emphasize the story and help illustrate your narrative.

By the way, on our site you can find other guides. For example, guides on working in utilities like 3ds Max or Maya. We also have a huge library of content with 2D textures and 3D models that you can download for free and use to realize your game or architectural ideas.