The Animated Self Development 7: Adding Colour

From the start of this animation I had an idea of what I wanted this animation to look like visually with it's colour pallet. I was going o go for a quite muted look. 

If you imagine a corridor, but underwater, that's the kind of look I was setting out for. But I struggle with colour in my animations a lot and to me, picking the right colour is a very difficult task because not only does it have to work, but it has to work with all the other colours on screen. I'm a big fan of the ink-dropper tool that instead of creating your own colour from nothing you simply highlight a pixel on another image and it picks up that exact image. 

Unfortunately the colours in the footage I had shot weren't quite what I was going for and when I'd use the tool I found it would't translate very well from live action to animation, often resulting in being too dark. I looked at other animations that I feel to be visually beautiful such as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and captured screen shots from various points in an episode that had colours in it I felt would work well. 

But then I found that the more colours I was adding in to an already complicated keyframe made it look all the more complicated and messy. There were things I wasn't taking into account such as lighting and shading. Eventually I found that I was becoming so overwhelmed that I decided to turn the image grayscale. This did not solve my problem, I felt by doing this I wouldn't have to worry about colours anymore but a) I still had to think about what shades of grey to use where and b) I didn't really want to animate a dream in black and white because I don't feel I do dream in black and white so I wouldn't be staying true to the dream I had.

In the end I decided that after hours of messing around with colour I needed to imply abandon it and come back to colouring my frames, when I would actually have a decent amount of frames to colour, which at the rate of which I'm animating at might not happen.

But when if I do come to colouring my frames Molly (an expert in colour and colour theory) agreed to help me pick out just three colours that I could use in my animation so I do not get bombarded.