COLOUR AS COMPLEXITY

I have a book called “Film as Art” - no idea why I bought it, or if it was recommended to me, but it’s an interesting read. In many ways totally outdated (it was written in the 1950s), in many ways 100% relevant to today (art styles change, but the purpose of it never does)

Anyway, one thing that stuck out to me was the author Rudolf Arnheim’s insistence that colour would be no good for film. Too fussy. An unnecessary complication, like 3D. People would try it and go back to black & white..

There’s some sense to this. Traditional painters start in charcoal, then grisaille, honing their craft in colourless mediums moving into colour. (But they DO move into colour, which is what Arnheim forgot!)

Filmmakers don’t follow that path. I’ve often wondered if we should, though. I’ve noticed that the modern reaction to someone making a black and white film today is to assume that they’re doing it to be pretentious, to try and make their film seem arty. But black and white is just simpler than colour. Shouldn’t we start simple and move to more complex afterwards?

Maybe. Probably. But since we don’t, here’s a cheat sheet on colour theory!

What’s Inside

•The wheel – primaries, secondaries and tertiaries, plus why warm vs cool is the single most useful axis to name on set.

•Hue, saturation, value – how each axis maps onto your grading tools, with a live colour explorer to test it yourself.

•Harmony – complementary, analogous and monochromatic (plus triadic and split-complementary for reference), and what each does to the eye.

•Temperature – Kelvin as physics, not mood, and how mismatching warm and cool light separates a subject from its background.

•Value & structure – the desaturate test and simultaneous contrast, and why the eye reads brightness before it reads colour.

•Perception & practice – colour-sound associations, the Bouba/Kiki effect, and a quiz that generates a fresh palette every round.

Since colour theory is by its nature theoretical, it can take us to the point where creativity goes to die - thinking too much and doing too little.

So as always, apply this knowledge to make it stick. Try and create shots with specific colour language. Experiment with colour contrast in a shot to guide the viewers eye. And most importantly, strip back the colour in shots and see what happens.