The Richness of Color

 Good afternoon Blog,

For our latest essay, we watched a section from the series "Killing Eve". Immediately throughout watching the exert, I was captivated by it's unique showcase of visual representation to show how a person acts. Especially in it's first episodes. 

The show itself has been praised for it's unique way of story telling through the use of color alone. These definetely help to enhance a scene and display a "show don't tell" approach to there story telling. A good example of this is the red motif in the gelato store. The red motif of Villanelle and the way the scenes are shot makes her out to be a more antagonistic force from the get go than other characters introduced. I especially liked the detail on her watch where there is red on it and it's up to the audiance to decide if that's real live blood or just gelato. 

Another example I really love is the title card. The yellow and black can represent a lot of things from just the first epsiode alone. It can represent the joy for Villanelle of killing eve as yellow is associated with happy things (think joy from inside out). It may also represent the corruption within MI5 where yellow represents corruption within groups and the black further attributing in the darker motif. 

Another movie I watched recently was the kung fu panda movies. While I originally thought they were going to be unassuming cartoons about a fat panda somehow learning to do kung fu, they were way more layered than I thought. For example, In all four movies, there is a color motif representing each villain. 

Ti Lung's Color motif is blue. This represents his potential for becoming the dragon warrior but also the contempt he still harbors within himself for his father figure to shun him once he was turned down of the position.

This blue is also in great contrast to Po's gold coloring that is prevalent throughout all the movies. The gold may represent a multitude of different things like his ability to shine and bring out the best in others and himself. It could be his literal golden personality and him finding out about himself through the dragon scoll which was blank the whole time. It could be him becoming a teacher a beacon of light for his fellow masters, or really just finding himself finally. Po's coloring is important as it reflects off all the other villains.

There are more but my favorite by far is Shen's red. I already talked about red but for me, it's a striking color for visually showcasing a character. In this example, we are introduced to his horrifying red through Po's frightened flashback to the genocide of the pandas. This red and that point signifies bloodshed, murder, chaos and death.

However, by the end of the movie Po finds inner peace with him. He is not out for revenge but rather for Justice and the red turns into something like hope and love, two other things red can stand for. I found the changing of the meaning of the color to be very interesting and rewarding for people who payed attention during the film. Simple color motifs can create an atmosphere for characters or a movie that can enhance it past what it already was. 

As for my film, I’m not sure how I want to specifically do color motifs. Even a little bit of it would be important into conveying maybe the militaristic aspect of the opening that I would like to go for but I still need to research colors that relate to the military. I’m very much interested in integrating it so we will see where this goes. Anyways, that’s about all the time I have left.