Color is such an integral part of an animation. Color has the power to communicate the mood, tone, and emotion of your story, and can enhance the meaning and motivation in your piece. In order to create the best story, you must lock down what the best color choices are and to do that, you first must understand color vocabulary.

Some important terms to know include:

Hue: the common color name in the spectrum (red, blue, green, etc.)

Saturation: the intensity or purity of a color

Value: the relative lightness or darkness of a color (light exposure determines value)

Tone: overall brightness or darkness of an entire scene and contrast between elements

To start on your journey of mapping the color, you must first create a color script, which will help you outline and visualize the colors in your animation. The colors should serve your story and help to tell the big picture. Too many colors overwhelm the viewers. Some of the strongest stories have extremely limited color palettes and even work monochromatically. It is best to have a minimalist mindset, when it comes to defining your color palette. A great first step in creating your color script is to picture your entire story and if it had to be one color, what would it be? This, like a theme, should help influence your creative choices moving further.

Before creating a finalized color script, it is important to first work out a pre-color script (PCS), which looks at your storyboard and represents it with colors bars that match your essential story beats. Color is most important in those bigger scenes, and that is why it is necessary to nail down the proper look for them. Here, you can be creative and go with your gut color instincts, you stick to some traditional symbolism that is widely used with certain colors. Choosing the right hue, saturation, and value for the key moments will help amplify the emotions in your story. Once the PCS is complete, you can then move on to working with each board in your story to define the entire color script.

Color tips

Design for Movement: make sure your colors in the backgrounds do not compete with the moving objects. Your moving aspects should be the main focus of the piece. Desaturating the background colors can help make your characters stand out even more.

Limit your Palette: Less is more when choosing a color palette. If there is too many colors, it can be confusing to viewers and distracting from your story.

Use Saturation Mindfully: Saturated colors are intense, pure versions of color. They can be used to spotlight certain things or characters in your scene. A great way to use saturation is keeping the main character saturated in a desaturated environment, which keeps the focus on them.

Support your Subject: Moving objects need space. Creating an open area around them, white space, can help keep your audience’s eye from wandering.

Surprise Color: Using an unexpected that differs from the overall color palette in a key moment in your story can tie together a key idea or trigger a climax. A surprise color is a very powerful and should be used very intentionally and sparingly.

Select one Thematic and One Accent Color: It is important to choose one dominate color that ties together your whole piece. Choosing a thematic color gives your a place to start to build your color palette. From there, you can pick accent color that work with main color theme.

Weird Science

Animation provides the prefect breeding grounds for experimentation, which is an essential step for getting the most out of the animated process. Experimentation can help you discover new techniques and storytelling skills that may even help you to discover the defining moment of your story. Experimentation is equivalent to a scientific “research and development” stage in the process. It is necessary for you to find your weird science as your take risks, test limits, learn, and play with your animation.

In experimentation, you must forget about the rule, careful color choices and design techniques. You must make bad art and let your imagination run wild. When you relax and stop worrying, you are at your most creative.

You must also learn to fail better, where you push yourself to the edge of your skillset, beyond your level of comfort. You need to figure out what areas you lack in and try to fill those gaps, learning how to become better in those areas, while not becoming perfect, but proficient enough to grow your talent and test your creativity and artistic skills.

Once you experiment, you can then apply your weird science to your project. Draw a table with each scene’s number, along with columns listing where you might experiment. In these scenes you can experiment with design, movement, sounds, transitions, and more. Think about how experimenting might improve your piece and don’t be afraid to be influenced by others, as that can spark your own ideas.

Storytelling through Stop Motion

A stop motion is a step up from last week’s cinemagraph in the challenges and experience that it takes to make one. A stop motion is a technique where back to back photos are used, instead of a streamlined video, to give still figures the illusion of movement. Stop motions can range in difficultly and technique, being created with figures, clay models, and anything else your creativity can imagine.

Examples of Powerful Stop Motions

This stop motion was fun and creative, made with simple materials. It is a stop motion anyone can make, but still is creative and intriguing to watch.

This collection of stop motions is also made with every day objects. It is creative, turning different objects into each other and its execution was very well done.

This stop motion is definitely very unique. It was created with clay and took a lot of skill and time to create.

This hilarious stop motion is very well done. It is such a great story to follow and no detail was left out, from the bubbling water in the hot tub to the facial expressions of the characters.

This last stop motion is definitely well done and very creative. This is very professional and has a ton of detail and effort put into its creation.

My Stop Motion Preproduction

Here are two preproduction templates I have used to come up with story ideas for my stop motion animation.

Test Stop Motion

Here is a 5 second test stop motion animation I created. I used a series of 20 photos to show M&Ms moving across the screen. Testing this helped me think more about how to position the camera, as well as the types of sounds effects I could use to represent actions in my stop motions. Creating this also helped me think about some aspects of a stop motion I hadn’t thought about before and I will carry what I learned here into my next, bigger, stop motion animation.

Color and Experimentation in Animation