Understanding the Role of a Color Scripter in Animation Production

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will um i'll explain everything better all right it's 11

it's 11 11. make a wish uh all right

welcome everybody to lecture number 19. today we're going to be talking about

color scripting what the color scripter does what's

the role of a color scripter in the pipeline and what are necessary things that you

should know if you want to pursue that career and what qualities you should possess to pursue that career

i myself am a color scripter full-time as a freelance artist in my career i did

almost i don't know probably over at least over 6 000 frames for color

script and i'm going to be sharing my experience

and my knowledge so as usual

like in storyboarding like anywhere else everything starts with an idea or with a script

this is a script for the incredibles and as you can see the storyboard artist was reading the script and then making

frames one by one in the usual pipeline right colorscripter comes and remember we

covered this in visual development lecture one what the role is of color scripter but we're going a little bit

more in depth now so when the storyboard is complete it's usually given out to a color script

artist especially in a 3d pipeline why because everything has to be built in 3d lit in 3d and then it's much

cheaper to do a color script that looks something like this

all right and then color script has an overall color

progression and emotion from beginning to an end and then the 3d team what they can do is

they can get inspired by this or copy it frame i mean beat by beat and then replicate the lighting in there

all right and we're going to be covering a little bit of examples of actual finished projects that are color

scripted today so yeah um the 3d team

is very expensive you know you do you i think everything is

lit uh in nuke but i might be mistaken again i'm not a 3d artist i don't know what exactly the software that they use

to put the light bulbs in right but a color script is a big money saver why because first

of all you pre-visualize your entire color progression in terms of story beats emotional progression lighting

mood and atmosphere and then when the 3d team comes in they already have a guide how to light up each section of the

story a feature film a commercial doesn't matter and then don't have to go you know from scratch because

if you go from scratch there's a big possibility that you're gonna have a frankenstein of a movie what is a

frankenstein of a movie it's only have one shot and one color palette the other one another color palette then you have

a repeating color palette here and then what is needed in the production they're gonna send a screenshot

of the 3d render 2 to the artist or to the director and then he has to do a paint

over and then at the end of the day you can have a frankenstein of a movie and that is not good

so our role as color script artist is to first understand the script to a t or the main story and usually the

director comes to you and explains it to you right and then you usually are provided with an animatic

last time when borja was speaking he showed us an animatic which was basic sound design and storyboards

most of the time storyboards that i get look something like this this is from the fishermen diet the end prologue that

i already showed you before guys and my role as a color script artist is to

first listen to the director in the script that he gave me

i listened to his notes ask as many questions as possible then watch animatic over and over and over

again until i can picture the whole thing in my brain and understand what emotional beats are most

important then what do i do well i screenshot the most important

frames so for example if we're going to look at this we have let's say the the gate here and here i'm gonna probably

choose this one right this frame and then we have like a close-up this is important or maybe instead of a close-up

i'm gonna take this shot because i know that this is an emotional beat when he turns around right maybe

first time they meet i also gonna keep it as an emotional beat first time he gives him the bag you get

you get the main idea and then i go through the whole storyboard like this trying to indicate

what are the main emotional aspects of this story and then i screenshot everything by hand

sometimes sometimes i'm given

a set of frames by an art director already but hap that happens very rarely because the director usually doesn't

have the time to do that usually he needs to hire a person who makes his life easier so usually i like to say

okay what do you think are the main emotional moments you say maybe this maybe this might gotcha then i go into

the animatic itself pause it get the main screenshot and then i compile everything into a giant

file like this where all of my frames are together now

color scripting starts what is the color scripting process so first is understanding the story to the

t second watching an animatic or watching a storyboard until your eyes bleed

why because you need to rehearse the freaking story in your mind so many times that you don't even need an

animatic and when you press play in your own brain you can imagine lighting sound animation everything so the only

thing that you have to do is go and then start putting the lighting the mood and

atmosphere in there okay so i'm gonna give you one example this is the job that i did with borja

the meeting kind of went like this it's uh it's a kid who is excited to wake up for christmas but it's five days

until christmas so each day something happens and then his day progressively gets

you know suckier and suckier and suckier little note when you are a color scripter sometimes

you will get a script to work from sometimes you'll get a storyboard

to work from sometimes you'll get nothing to work from only words and descriptions in this job right if we

want to go into a little detail this job started with a temp script so it was unfinished so it was a temp

script that was always changing we had no storyboard and we didn't had any locations designed

there was no house no nothing the only thing that we knew we're gonna have a house and then we had the main emotional

beats so as a color script are just slash visual development artists we also are have to be good

at what doing first of all time of the explorations

and secondly actually keyframes so this is started as a fast color key

and then went into almost like a keyframe because we needed a starting point and then we needed a baseline so

when you're thinking about your story or any color script in general uh you need to think about your baseline

the baseline is the neutral state or the emotional state of your character in your story in terms of color because

we're talking about color scripting right so as a starting point we thought what is

the mood of this world without anything happening to it is it always moody and always like happy is it this or that

like for example if we're gonna take the movie dark night right

the dark knight is always gruesome and scary why because that's the universe that it lives in that's the baseline

that's the baseline of that world so remember in the beginning in this camp i

told you to do a keyframe a starting point keyframe and most of you probably treated it as

a default state of your world and that's what we did before we started going to actual storyboarding color scripting we

did the baseline and then after that what we did we explored the overall story

in i would say color boards or color scripts color script um frames i will explain

what the difference between color strips color scripts and color boards and key frames are a little bit later but then

what we did is we had this image and it was okay the design of the boy wasn't even finished

so i said well it's a redhead boy with glasses and i did my own version of it and the

dog changed overall and i did a little um homage to buzz lighter here on the left

but but but the baseline is now explored but

collected right and this is not the process that i'm telling you right

this is one of the variations this is not in the ultimate way but this is how what we work on this production and my

role in there was as a color script artist so then after the baseline was established what did we do next well me

and borja we sat down and we explored the main beats of the story so first he wakes up

with the dogs you can see the the frame change the camera has a little bit more depth of field you know then he builds a

snowman then he meets his sister for the first time then they ride into the forest and then

they encounter and then they they have a little adventure on the sled and then they go on the lake

and then uh some drama happens because he feels left out because his parents like the sister more now and then we

have a spooky moment so see instead of doing all of this in the beginning we explored the whole story in minimum

frames as possible we diluted the story into i mentioned there nine frames right we knew then we

had a happy beginning a little bit of a progression then something happened and then slowly everything goes into chaos

and darkness that's why we have this very well worker likes spielberg a lot so we

have a very spielberg inspired spooky shot right so again

one of the most important skills of a color script artist is simplifying the story and boiling it down to

simple statements and i know i've been drilling that into your brain keep everything simple try to extract the

essence and that's another way or yeah another way that this skill be can

be useful for you right okay we established the baseline and we explored the keyframes

in terms of mood and where it's going to go before i even started going into the color script itself and i'm going to

give you a little bit of a disclaimer but a spoiler for the half of this color script i work without a storyboard and a

storyboard at my own moments that's why the composition's a little bit simpler and then somewhere around the way here i

think the storyboard art just came along and then i started working from a

storyboard as you can see color scripting pipeline can

can be weird because if you are a good color scripter right you should be also a little bit of a storyboard art just a

little bit of illustrator here and there so you can be invited early on to explore the story from color standpoint

and then what i did in the beginning when i had let's say frame like this that it's not in a movie frame like this

i did a frame like like this for example this is called um

i would i would call it color script and then there's color boards are they the same thing almost so let me

show you an example with the incredibles hopefully you're following me on this so

this is a colored script or color strip you can call it whatever you want right and

it represents the whole movie another way to represent the whole movie this is called

movie barcodes or movie color barcodes do you know what it is well a movie color barcode is when you

take one frame of a movie and you and it's one pixel wide and then you stack it

against each other and you compress into this you're looking at this and you're

probably like misha what the hell is this this is chaos but

no it isn't this is jaws our favorite movie of all time

this is the matrix this is the lion king this is the batman duck

dark knight rises and this is the incredibles you're like misha why is this useful

well when you are color keen

or where you are color scripting your job is technically imagine this an emotional progression through color

uh if we look at the lion king here we can we can kind of see where each moment

starts and ends especially in terms of drama for example here we have a lot of jungle

here we have a lot of open open air scenes i think this is in the desert

those are night scenes night scenes this is i think the final fight and then and then at the end as we can see we

have hopeful colors right and in animation usually colors used much more to tell a story and tell an

emotional progression versus when we're talking about films and movies because with films and movies it's a little bit

harder to manipulate lighting here and there and there's movies like uh for example what's that movie about

uh the second part about uh robot who became sentient um what's it called what a bunch of flying ships and then

indiana jones already i forgot but um in that movie what's that what's that what's the name

of the movie why do i forget movies when i'm starting my lectures

uh it's not inception but it doesn't matter um

in movies sometimes they use color to their benefit to tell a story but for the most part it's monochrome

uh blade runner thank you thank you so much so in blade runner and we're gonna talk about it in our lecture

on friday they use the color yellow for example to represent his memory

and discoverage of truth so the whole movie progressively becomes more orange as he goes and in the beginning it's

very desaturated and in gray and then he finds like an orange flower or yellow flower and then he goes into a room that

is always yellow and then the the color yellow starts to represent truth in there and as the movie progressed the

movie became more orange and more yellow because he was getting closer to the truth right but with the movies usually

like we see here we have ocean ocean ocean interior scene ocean ocean ocean interior scene

it's basically monochrome right because when we're talking about movies in general uh

they're always are color graded usually all right we we all know how like

uh a dark knight movie should look like it's a it's very dramatic

um very very very very very contrasty blacks and shadows

and highlights with like um blue and white um lights here and there here we have the matrix it's basically green

with slight variations here and there when they go outside in the ct right and then we should when we see lion king

compared to all that you see the difference how much of course we still have jungle colors

and desert colors because it's in a savannah right but at the same time we see that there's more things happening

with color as we go same thing with incredibles incredibles is a pretty long movie i think it's much longer than the

lion king but here we have again we have blues and oranges and greens and then the reds i think this

one is when he gets discovered in uh in the lair now actually here when he gets discovered in the lair in the in in the

incredibles and he discovers that all of his friends are dead and then see over here the whole thing uh turns white it's

when the lights pop up and then he basically goes into darkness so we

need to think about our entire story before we even paint anything over create a color script we need to think

how it begins how it ends what are the main emotional moments here here here and here and then we have to basically

as i showed you before we can imagine the moments that everything leads up to

right and then we should visualize it in our brain first why

well because imagine that if um in the beginning i start color scripting linearly from

point a to point b right like right here and let's say i start too intense here

let's say with oranges and red and something else and then i have a last moment where they fight

so if i'm gonna have too big of a color or two emotional of a moment here

there's gonna be no room in terms of color and progression to then end here so that's why it's really important to

imagine all of your important beats in the story and then imagine them in your brain you can do

keyframes like i did with borja um right and then from there on what i can

do is i can connect the in-betweens of those things and see how i can lead up from for example a

sunsetty orange time of day to kind of like a diffused

lighting very blue time of day right so because every storyboard or every color script where every frame has to come in

with a context so that's why it's really important to provide

a bird's eye view first to yourself plan all the key moments here here here here and here in the

color script and then start thinking about how everything merges one thing into another

in terms of color and i'm going to talk about that a little bit later so

let's say you received the storyboard you received the script you did the

keyframes in your brain or in in real life then you start

color scripting how the process usually goes and here i want you to introduce to color strips

so what are what are color strips in general i'm going to show you two examples of color strips

um so first one is the incredibles right i showed you the um

i showed you the color barcode of the incredibles but this was the color strips

again color script and color strips are different things so let me make a note color script

and then color strip two different things

so a color strip is

again see in this movie i'm pretty sure that the color scripter that came to incredibles i think this is incredibles

one they didn't they might not had a storyboard but they might have had an

unfinished script so what the color scripture did here he went in and then planned the entire movie with

whatever he heard from brad bird and then saw it in such a low res i couldn't find the high res of this

and i didn't had enough time to get a book for this but what he did

very very gesturally and very very as you can see [Music]

very simply he made each emotional moment of the entire

story this is not every beat and not every frame but it's every emotional beat of the story and he put it in a

collar strip right here he's experimenting just with color

and again with local colors of the characters interacting with each other but he's depicting an emotional moment

for the entire story from point a to point b and of course then they did clean up um color scripts that

could have looked like this or could have looked a little bit more polished it again it depends on um on the

director and it depends on the 3d team right so this is one way of creating a color

strip which is you are just thinking out loud you are reading the script and as you read in the script you make a strip

and then you make color notes there's two different ways to do color notes and when you are thinking about

your entire story of progression from point o to from point for point a to point b

right some people all right you know they will you know

they'll um very very loosely they will

um for example if this is the incredible mr incredible fights with the robot

and that's the moment where he fights with the robot then he runs away and loses someone they will very loosely uh

depicted almost like cave drawings what's going on and then they're gonna be like okay there's gonna be the ct so

the ct is probably gonna have this time of day and then just do color notes and then and again it looks something like

this super simple uh it establishes context so context here is what uh green jungle and then

jack um no not jack yeah flash flash as uh

red highlight right and then black contrasty things that chase him into the jungle

right and this is more than enough to basically explain yourself the whole sequence of course there's going to be

little details where the lighting comes from but that's where the clean color script or color

boards come in that's when you actually define everything for the 3d for the 3d team to a t right for example

here there's no questions the lighting is coming from here he has a highlight here but again color strips are there

just to make a plan and go for it um in my experience color strips are

usually something that you do in the back of your brain i don't have enough time to

for example here i think i have two and a half months or three months to do 135 frames

and my sketching my sketching in my thinking about it

created the color stripped in my brain but sometimes when you just don't have the

you just you just don't have the ability to jump into the color script or anything else

you can do color strips another way of doing a color strip

is purely with color and let me demonstrate you how i usually do it when i receive a storyboard or an animatic so

as i said before i think about the story from point a to point b

and i rehearse it in my brain i remember when i was uh i did a lot of apex legends uh colors

color power strip color script and by the end of the job i could hum the entire track or the temporary track

that was in the trailer i could rehearse every single line of dialogue because i was re-watching it over and over and

over again for example with my process of color scripting for one day i don't even do any color scripting i'm only

planning i'm re-watching the animatic over and over again i can until i get an accurate representation of emotional

moments in my brain and then i start thinking some more and then i sleep you know and then i wake up

and then i start so again thinking about the story and experiencing the emotion and knowing

your material knowing your story is one of the most important skills of a color script artist because our job is not to

create pretty image not at all our job is to create a correct moment a correct emotion that

is gonna you know strike the heart of the viewer uh when he's watching the story right so

i showed you the incredibles color strip and now i'm gonna talk about the more simplified version of a color strip a

lot of you guys probably seen this thing right it's when you have a lot of colors

in a weird looking line and all doesn't make sense to you right i'm pretty sure all of you like if you

looked at uh any color script artists or visual development artists they have this cool

looking thing and you probably think it's like well they maybe they're just

showing the colors that they use or you know some people just included just so it looks cool what they did but actually

this color strip has a purpose what this purpose is well it's a thinking out loud tool so what do

you do you look at your storyboard and you imagine it in color and as you're going through the storyboard let's say

it's linear right i'm like okay i'm gonna have a night here so it's gonna be

night there's gonna be a lot of dark blues and purples probably and then i have a

gate that is lit by

by a fire right or a torch so what i'm going to do i'm going to get some browns in there and then i'm gonna do

a little bit of orange light so now i have a combinations of color that in my brain i know

you know i know what it means this is the context color

this is some local colors and this is the highlight color of sometimes just one frame if it's too

complex sometimes a sequence so for example just this color bar or color strip

technically tackles an entire thing here right so i'm done so now what i'm doing is i'm going

forward so what i can do is i can you know i can be lazy so what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna you know i'm just gonna

cover it everything with blue because i know the entire thing is gonna be the same thing so now what i'm doing is and

this is like the industry secrets i guess i don't know i haven't seen anyone talk about this out loud so the next

thing is like all right i have a more open shot so my i might have the moon come out of there so you know what i'm

gonna do i'm gonna add a little bit of green in there to explain to myself that the moon comes out and then i'm gonna

put you know orange color again in there maybe with some reds because i want to have some

reds in there uh for the for the fire torch right and then i continue on right then i have uh the same shot and it's

going to be only the water so i'm going to be lazy you know i just kind of fill it in like this

and then i'm like all right i have an important shot that's going to be very contrasty and there's going to be some

local colors in there of the characters and he's redhead right so i'm gonna have okay my context is in the middle of the

night so i'm gonna keep it the same way and then what i'm gonna do well he has some local colors of fur on him and it's

gonna probably gonna look like this and then he's gonna he's gonna be a redhead so you know what for the highlight i'm

gonna have you know his red locks because you know in in the scene that's what's gonna attract the

most um um it's gonna attract the viewer's eye

right uh and that's about it and then i'd move forward and again this thing is repetitive

those frames so what i can do i can just copy this into there and of course this is not 100 accurate this is just me

explaining my mindset of color strips of course what i could

have done i could have done it like the incredibles right i could have done this and then i could have darkened it for

the context and then i could have uh you know did the uh what's called the dam and then i

could have put you know the fire torches there and and then the moon if i wanted to and

i explained like kind of like like this you know and then i can i can

put the main character in there standing lit by a torch like this but again and this

is his spear for example and here's his nose and stuff like that but but i don't need to do that

why well because i already have it in my brain with a color strip right so this is too

different of how to do things and then you can either adopt one or you can use

both um but let's continue on a little bit more so i will go through the entire

thing like the entire thing i would probably fill in with blue why well because most of the things here are

on the lake at night so i'm gonna have my you know my primary color of blue and then

everything else is gonna be mixing into that and then i can be like all right

somewhere in the middle there's going to be a big bloody scene so what i'm going to do you know i'm just going to add

some blood in there like okay this is the red and then that's going to influence my lighting

emphasizing on the red color because here i can also make notes to myself on this time chart basically which is here

sometimes i give it to the director and i say hey here you know

nice calm beginning right

um and then over here i can say just the word bloody

bloody boom for example and those notes are going to be very useful to myself later on because what i can do with

those notes if i don't imagine the whole color script i can go and see where the most

color change appears in the in in a linear progression and then what i can do i can

just tackle this section and i can tackle this section and then i can tackle this section so one thing leads

to another in the color script right and then i know that i have a pretty fiery ending where there's going to be an

explosion so i'm going to have some you know fire in there and maybe there's going to be a sunrise for example so

what i'm going to do i'm going to add a little bit of purples into the skybox colors right and now i can see that oh

the hope is rising over here see that's another way of using color strips

again super simple version the entire sequence is is sequence is in

your brain and you're imagining it and then you are leaving yourself little bread crumbs to remember when you're

going later on right or you can do it the incredible style when they're doing a super simplified

version of the entire thing right and they actually putting some compositions in there and local colors in the objects

almost like cave drawing super simple and understandable if you want to go an extra mile this is

more than cool but again see this is for the director to see because our job is to make sure that the

director understands everything and the director can see a bird's eye view of the movie right so i'm pretty sure that

brett bird requested it for himself so he can see the entire progression because a color key artist probably can

do as we did here this

but if you're gonna show this to brad bird brad bird doesn't he didn't go through

the same he cannot upload himself into your image and understand your color um color stripped notes to yourself so

sometimes you can make this and then can do so this is level level 1 color strip and it say you can do a level 2

color strip and that is going to look something like again i showed you this and after all

this you're gonna do an actual level three but it's gonna be color

script now right so level three is color script that's when you have the entire plan in mind you know where you're going

i'm always skipping level two i don't need it i don't need to show it to anybody and

you know borja he trusts me enough so what we do we just we discuss this invoice channel so then what i do is

when i know see when i know the entire color progression in my mind through color notes and color strips i begin

doing a color color keys or colors or color script uh difference between color keys and color

script now there's there's not a big of a difference honestly there's no

difference whatsoever uh i would just call you know

more polished things color keys so this is a color key for me like it's it's not it's not good enough to be

a keyframe and it's not bad enough to be a super rough color board or color script so i call it color key but you

know again um technically the same thing you can call this whole thing color keys or color

boards uh or you can also call it a color script um honestly it's it's almost the same

thing just don't confuse it with keyframes keyframes are usually just very polished things that toby usually

does for our productions right um

yeah and everything is pretty synonymous so don't get too too confused i honestly call this a color script

because again i am not doing pretty images and i'm focusing only on color and color progression so i always call

them color scripts um yeah so you are more than welcome to

call everything cover scripts do all right so we went and discussed color strips level one level two and then we

dive into a color script and again under understand this if you imagine everything pretty well

right so for example here i did a lot of planning first of all i planned out my time of day

for for each sequence because i knew that each sequence would uh technically represent or have a

certain mood for certain actions so for example the entire color script plan that i had in mind when i was doing this

i wanted the colors of day one represent morning early morning and then day two i wanted

it to represent kind of later morning then day three i wanted to represent

in the middle of the day and then day four i wanted it to represent

sunset day five i wanted it to be late sunset and nighttime

and then the last scene which is was day morning of day six basically or morning

of day five i wanted a sunrise for hope so there's a so there so through the entire 20 minute of the episode we had

an entire progression of time of day but also that time of day showed you

what kind of a mood the boy is in and then it emphasized what was going on in the story because when he was just

waking up and everything was like very mystical and you know mourning and excited and very exciting i had

dominating oranges and yellows for the morning and then when she came along right it was kind of

still early morning still exciting but then it was slowly getting into the day it was getting slightly less exciting

right and then it was day all the excitement is out of it he's actually in the car you know being sad at all

um yeah and as you can see here see all those blues i

already had a color plan in mind when i did those two see sometimes you need to make your life

easier by just planning the whole story with just keyframes figure out the main emotional beats in the main time of days

and then you're gonna make your life much much easier why because this entire sequence yes there's a little bit of you

know maybe the sun is going down a little bit here and there but for the most part

it looks very similar to this same blue same same green same sky box

type of a deal right and of course sometimes you need to think about transitions

transitions between one scene to another scene for example here we have in the middle of the day then we have some

blues in there and now here i have a i call it transitional frame when i have some colors from previous scenes and

then next scenes so for here i have same blues that are here just a little bit darker and then i'm introducing some

oranges right and then as you can see here now we have more we still have blues and

oranges but it's not a not that of a drastic um difference because sometimes it's

awkward when you have one time of day and then it's boom it's another lighting scenario so sometimes if i was doing

let's say for example a color board for it or a color strip let's say if i had uh you know if i had a red sequence

that was super intense right what i'm gonna do i'm gonna have some traditional colors i'm gonna have

some pinks and maybe you know purples in there

slowly descending from the reds into the purples and then maybe we can

go into blues right so for example if we need to go transition into a blue scene what i'm gonna do i'm gonna have a

transitional see here i'm gonna have a transitional sequence or a frame where i'll try to make that happen and i'll

show you one transitional scene that i did for clash of clans it's a pretty good

example so here's a clash of clans storyboard i'm gonna dive into story really really

quickly you can watch it on clash of clans official channel it's the first video clash 10 anniversary so we have a

barbarian who really really wants to help out and everything is exciting and awesome but he fails it's everything so

he tries to hang out the um the light bulbs and it fails he tries to light a lamp with a little match but the wizard

does it for him he tries to you know he tries to hang a little disco ball but the guy who

lifts up a giant dude and you know they left they lift up a giant disco ball and now

[Music] he's sad and now he goes away and he's all alone

and he's sitting you know lonely lonely me hello darkness my old friend right and then transition into a blue scene so

what did i do here so i introduced excitement with a color yellow and then slowly slowly i start

introducing a little bit of blues here and there every time he gets sad right see over here i have some blue

um blue light bulb shining onto him because what i'm trying to do i'm trying to

prepare the audience to meet him in this uh moment so what i do i make a transition transitioning scene of course

introduce color blue here a little bit but that's because i needed some fill light here in the shadows but

you can tell that i already started preparing the audience to have a color change and over here what he's doing

he's leaving the excitement backwards and he is um

walking towards blueness or or tower sadness as you can see here he looks back as you have a little bit of war of

warms on him but he's going into the cold environment and it looks very naturally right when we have this shot

imagine if we had none of that we would have had just orange and then

blue and like what the hell happened right so you also have to think about how one scene

or one emotional moment goes to another emotional moment when you are creating your color keys and again

color strip just purely naked color notes will really help you out and you guys

probably saying but misha i have no idea what each color represents what how do i represent sadness how you represent this

and that do not worry i will cover the emotional state of the um

i will cover the emotional state of the characters and how you know how each color affects our

emotion on third lecture about color and light and right now we're just talking about the

principles of how to plan everything out and then we're gonna go we're gonna dive deeper and deeper into actual making of

the color script and then technicalities of it right now it's just a general approach why

because you need to start thinking about your own story and some of you guys have three frames some have 10

most of you have three right but even when you're thinking about your three key moments you still can apply

same theory that is used in color scripting to your keyframes right because you can

imagine the whole story and then you can pick the main emotional moments and see how they colorate and match one into

another uh okay all right so

yeah color strips done level one level two this is a color

script that is usually done with the storyboard right that's the classic approach but again sometimes you need to

come up with your own things um yeah and all you have to do now when you have all the frames that you

screenshot from animatic and you understand how everything works you just go

sometimes for example i'm going to show it just imagine what this is was

undone frames so sometimes again i would just do this frame this frame and this frame

right and then i will go on day three i'll do all these frames leading up to

this frames and then i would do all these frames leading up to this one and then that

sometimes when i imagine the whole color script very well and i don't have to explain anything to myself i just do

frame frame frame frame because i have enough experience with clash of clans universe or with stories in general that

i don't have to plan everything ahead that much right the only reason why i do those sometimes if i

need to explain something to somebody like for example a few of my directors know how to read those color

color strips and they will understand what's going on in there so first i'll just do that send them their way

everything correct understandable i'll walk them through the whole thing said yeah sure go and then i'll just go

everything frame by frame linearly right sometimes when i work without the

storyboard i have to sketch out my own composition and that's okay sometimes you have to do that because

borja or the director still needs to see what the lighting is going to be even if the composition the layout is not the

same right because a lot of the times what does borja do or directors do they will just give me my sequence of really

rough color color keys and then going to give it to either a cleanup artist we're gonna do keyframes out of them or an

illustrator who can do keyframe moments sometimes like i remember that i was doing uh this sequence here

and i remember that i did just this like as you can see

i do not have a storyboard for this i knew that this guy will be pushing her up the hill so i did the the most

simplest composition ever and then what borja did he took this and he gave it to toby toby did a layout and then i on top

of toby's layout i did a a color key and then toby took the color key and then made a final

illustration out of it actually let me see if i can find the final illustration that toby did on top of my collar keys

if no one knows who toby is uh watch previous private previous lectures so um

toby i think he did i think he did post it not too long ago i just need to find it hey here you go i

found it um just need to do a screenshot of it so so i can see here

[Music] this is the frame that toby did and if you compare it in terms of color

from far away right it's basically the same i would say it's

the same thing but you see the purples are the same thing here the lighting scenario is the same here

of course he had a little bit like you know i i did some blowing stars here there was no light in this thing so but

it's called process of adding so what i did i explored the mood and colors really really quick and he took it and

he pushed it into the next level and that's how me toby and another guest

speaker who's going to be next week work i purely think about emotional

progression color and the story with borja from a bird's eye view

and then the people who do something more solid and more

defined they would just have this a simple statement and then a liberate more on it and push

it to the next level right and that's how my um that's how the process works

so now let's watch

um the animatic or or an animation for

this and hopefully the sound is going to be okay

and now i'm going to explain every decision that i did frame by not frame by frame but um

shot by a shot doo doo doo doo doo i just need to enable sound i'll make it super quiet

just in case we will get banned or something oh whoops that's a different one that's

11 minutes that's not the one i wanted to show sorry guys here it is

here's the correct one that's the other one that i did with borja but this one as you can see the shot with the with

the barbarian him lighting up the thing he made knocked off the guy lifting up

the guy and now the sad the sad part starts he's walking away

looks back there's still a little bit of light on him and now he's all alone that's when the craziness happens

yeah then he wakes up in the video game um yeah now you can see

what the final product was but you're gonna probably say but misha they don't look exactly like the color

keys and that's okay well because sometimes then everything is possible for the 3d team

but you let's say if you're listening to this and you want to be a color key artist

right this especially this is me talking to you right um

but you have to to understand that someone is going to come in and then they're going gonna replicate

it in 3d and not everything is possible in 3d what you're trying to do you you're trying to be as close as

possible to what is possible in again in 3d for the lighting team but you cannot guess everything like for example i'm

going to talk about specifics what you should keep in mind when you are doing your color keys

or in general honestly first of all you key light and we're going to be talking about the three

point light system on a wednesday but first of all you need to understand where your lighting

direction comes from your key light so the lighting team even though as you can see

not everything was perfect in that animation in terms of lighting but

if we compare this shot and then we just do a screenshot of it

and we're going to paste it in here yes it does look different why well because first of all when i was doing it

there was no grass here so i met i missed the local color of green but overall

you know the same orange light coming from the left the direction is the same because you have to understand that when

you're doing your color keys it's usually right after the storyboard phase and things can change over time but if

you have the essence of the moment in there it's going to tremendously help the 3d team right i think the best

moment that i think they copied almost exactly and this is from part two actually of

the same animation you know what i'm gonna show it to to you guys so you understand the full context of the color

keys so this is part two of the same thing he gets zapped turned away

and he wakes up and then madness happens and then the final shot

and then they all run in and i don't know if they die but let me show what's going to happen next

um yeah so let's start from the last shot so for example here everything's pretty simple i planned

everything out from [Music] i got blasted by dubstep music

i'm sorry guys um yeah so then

in part two right um i actually started the whole thing

from this shot as you can see it's more defined than others i did like i don't know 10

jump scare i'm sorry guys i hopefully you're all live now i see this is my way of keeping you on your toes stupid

youtube um but yeah i did this shot i did like 10 variations of it

10 variations like how the pixelation was this is technically a keyframe that started like a color key and then i

defined it more and more why because sometimes like the color key artists you need to define things more why

because smoke electricity some animation ideas here and there they're gonna use it

for the final shot and it's not enough for me just to simply say hey direction comes here i need to convey a little bit

more of like for example here this spear gets pixelated this doesn't and if you can do more than just thinking about

colors you can think about the final shot and you can be really good at polishing things up and

do like a keyframe maybe not super polished but polished

enough to get some visual information for the vfx team ahead 3d team ahead you're going to be very valuable

so for this sequence which was part 2 this is part 2. i started with the final shot why well because that's the main

reveal of the bad guy who is gonna that they're gonna fight and jump into the portal that he creates right so

i created a shot you know and then i started from the beginning right i

ended here when he gets sucked in this is also almost a key frame it's pretty it's pretty polished when he gets sucked

in into the hole right same thing here i think my my favorite shot was doing this because i like dramatic underlighting

and the frames were awesome i forgot what the storyboard is name is paul paul something i will try to link in him

in description his instagram but it was amazing boards and it makes all the difference between a

successful color script and i'm gonna say a mediocre one color wise it should be always good but when you have a

really skillful storyboard artist it's just you know oh it's just such a pleasure to work

with with great storyboard artists and the boards look something like this actually

all right as you can see here and here i did change the design here and there but the main essence

kept the same um same thing here for example i i didn't really change anything much

because i didn't need to sometimes i get just stick figures but here for example i added a few extra bars to the right

and then a foreground giant there or i just made a different screenshot in

animatic um yeah and it was amazing boards to work from and i loved it a lot as you can see

here he gets transported into a different game i guess i think they're releasing

they release like two or three new games for clash of clans and then

we have you know craziness happening and here we are talking about

fast-paced sequence and here there's no way to do let's say an in-between shot for color progression

right because another thing you have to think about is pacing do you have enough time to convince color change or any

kind of color storytelling uh through the images and through the

narrative right because here each each shot is like one two seconds long maybe three maximum it's really really fast

paced so here i couldn't have done it like oh and then he experiences you know trauma here and then he finds light here

now he's all healed up and then i cannot do this kind of color progression such a fast-paced