From the course: Essential Technical Aspects of Animation

Color models

From the course: Essential Technical Aspects of Animation

Start my 1-month free trial

Color models

- [Instructor] Another aspect of the coloring process is which colors to use for a character. And again, the traditional animation studios had a much harder time of this than we do today, we're spoiled today. Back in the day, they would have to paint different versions onto their different sheets of celluloid. So the color model department was a pretty busy department, as they were trying to fine-tune the right color combinations for each figure. So we would take, for example, this character and apply different treatments. And you can see how radically different he looks with different color model approaches. In addition to creating different versions of a character, in other words, each of these different color models really represents a different character. The director, the art director is going to have to pick one of these and settle on it. In addition to that, let's say we settle on the little green man cliche. We might still want to wonder what he looks like at nighttime. And in this case, this is a nighttime color model and the daytime color model. So the light sees, daytime comes, sun goes down and he's going to look something like this. So we're going to need different color models, depending on different environmental settings. For the most part, you can get away with your standard set. But you are going to need to do different treatments if you're going to have a lot of say, night scenes or a different environmental setting. And the color model departments and these were great. I'd pass the department and you'd see these cells lying around with the different characters. An animated feature might have hundreds of characters, so they would have hundreds of these sheets with the final color model design marked up with all of the different color areas. Right down to, notice here, like little spots. You want to keep these consistent. Obviously you can't have people just picking any old color out of the paint library. So you want to make sure that everyone follows this. And the departments might have their own color batch codes. So in this case, different color pots that are mixed in the right quantities to be applied to each area. Now in the modern age, we don't need to do this because most of us by this point, are working on computers. But it would be a good idea to provide color swatches if you're working on a project where you're sharing a lot of material. These days, we tend to use puppet systems and rigs. In which case, they come with the colors already kind of baked in. But if you're working on a project that in any way involves drawing or where it might not be clear, then you want to do things like apply, you might want to give RGB values. I've only had to do this a few times when a client was working on something that was like a corporate project, where the color code was absolutely crucial to the trademark. And they said, we have to have this particular value. Whenever it was, I forget what it was, they gave us the RGB numbers. So there couldn't be any mistake, they were so particular about it. So keep that in mind, especially if you're working on say a prestige project for a client who has a particular focus on the look and the style. And one last comment, of course, to make is the familiar Magpie Crow design. Which is two different birds, depending on the color model. So simply by adding this color separation, this little ink line here, we have the difference between two entire, what's going to look to. I'm not a bird expert but to me, the one on the left looks like a magpie. The one on the right, a crow, maybe a Raven. So that is the importance of how you can completely change the perception of a character, based on the assignment of different colors.

Contents