Using Colours to Tell Your Story: a case study on ‘Harry Bot 9000’

Colours are a cinematographers in most powerful tool there are instantaneous associations that we have to the emotions of each colour, it's rooted into our society. Now, expert cinematographers are able to deduce the emotions that you want to tell and how to use colours within image to tell them.

When it comes down to it, cinematography is purely the use of different visual tools to tell a story, colour is a huge section in this.

Emotional triggers caused by colour could be due to the colour itself, a contrast in colours, the absence of colour, the juxtaposition or placement of a colour.

There is so many ways to use colours to tell an emotion to an audience you just have to get creative. As there are so many ways to approach colour in cinematography, I wanted to look at one case study example, that case study being ‘Harry Bot 9000’.

‘Harry Bot 9000’ is one of my favourite films I've worked on. It tugged at the audiences' emotions, and I think a large part of that is due to the colours used in the film and the choices upon when we did and didn't use them.

There are two main very clear colours and ‘Harry Bot 9000’, that being red and green.

The use of these two colours as symbols through the idea of go and stop. Now, this meant more than just the concept of traffic lights, this visualised Harry's ability to move on from the past.

It was important to established the meaning of these Colours early on just to make sure the audience are completely on board and not just relying on the coincidence of what society associates to those colours. We did this at the beginning of the film, using green and the red alongside traffic lights where Harry waits despite there being no traffic. This establishes that we are using colours as start and stop for Harry as an individual.

Later, we meet other character, Lucy, who mostly uses green in her clothing and her props, that way we can see that she has moved on.

This is a useful tool when it comes to telling the story and the situation of the characters, but how we can use it to tell emotion?

To portray emotion is entirely different thing. For example, there was a third colour in ‘Harry Bot 9000’, blue. It is very subliminal throughout the entire film, used to represent the lingering past. Therefore, when we saw blue we then triggered a subliminal emotional response in the audience to think about reminiscing, nostalgia, history and looking back on where people once were. When you link that with the context of the characters current situation, the audience will feel an emotion which contrasts how the character once were, to where they are now.

Now it is up to your story to denote which emotion that is, but it's that linking and repetition of colour that enables emotive thought patterns to be initiated in your audience.