Understanding the Role of a Color Scripter in Animation Production
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Introduction
Good morning everybody! If you're joining me today, let's talk about a fascinating aspect of animation production—color scripting. It's one of those behind-the-scenes roles that plays a significant part in storytelling, visual art, and the overall feel of a movie or animation. Whether you're an aspiring artist, a student in a visual arts program, or just curious about the animation industry, this guide will walk you through the responsibilities and skills of a color scripter, defining what makes this role so special.
What is a Color Scripter?
A color scripter is a visual artist responsible for creating the emotional and atmospheric tone of an animated film through color. This role traditionally sits between storyboarding and the 3D lighting team, acting as a bridge that helps smooth the transition from 2D designs to 3D executions.
Responsibilities of a Color Scripter
- Understanding the Story: At the heart of everything is a deep understanding of the script or storyline. A color scripter must grasp not just the plot but also the emotional beats that need to be conveyed through color.
- Color Scripting Process: The process begins by working closely with the director and storyboard artists. The goal is to create a color palette and emotional arc that aligns with key moments in the narrative.
- Crafting Visual Inspiration: Utilizing tools like color strips and strips to visualize how colors interact, the color scripter helps shape how the 3D team manipulates lighting to fit the intended emotional cues of the storytelling.
The Role in the Pipeline
The role of a color scripter becomes particularly relevant in the production pipeline:
- Storyboarding Phase: Color scripters begin their work with the completion of storyboards, often going over animatics repeatedly to understand not only the visual flow but the emotional progression.
- Creating Color Boards: After understanding the emotional beats, a color scripter creates initial color boards, which set the tone for subsequent interpretations.
- Final Color Scripts: These scripts involve mapping out the color of every shot or scene in a concise manner, helping visual designers bring a cohesive look to the entire film.
Skills Required for a Color Scripter
To excel in this role, a color scripter should develop several essential skills:
1. Understanding Color Theory
- Mastery of color palettes and their psychological impacts is crucial. Colors evoke emotions; thus, knowing which shades to use in various contexts aids a color scripter’s storytelling prowess.
2. Cinematography Knowledge
- Awareness of how light and color change during different times of the day, and how they affect perception and mood, is necessary for creating effective shots.
3. Visual Storytelling
- Every frame must convey the narrative’s emotional arc. A great color scripter simplifies the complex emotional transitions throughout a project.
4. Technical Skills
- Familiarity with digital tools like Photoshop or similar software is crucial for actually executing color scripts and making the colors pop.
Examples of Successful Color Scripts
In animations like The Incredibles or Finding Nemo, the color scripts lay foundational work that aligns production with storytelling. By presenting color in a visually unified manner, the scripters ensure that all teams understand the colors and transitions they must execute in the 3D environment. Keyframes in these animations showcase how effective color scripting can establish mood and pacing for viewers, guiding their emotional experience throughout the film.
Conclusion
In summary, the role of a color scripter is invaluable in the world of animation. They shape the visual storytelling process, bridging the gap between traditional 2D designs and 3D execution, while ensuring emotional engagements through effective color application. Aspiring artists should not only develop their technical skills but also cultivate a keen understanding of narrative structure, emotional storytelling, and the psychology of color.
Remember, while the role might seem niche, the impact is significant! As you continue to develop your skills in animation and color scripting, embrace every step of the journey, enjoy the learning process, and always be mindful of the power of color to narrate and evoke emotions in storytelling! Stay energized, keep painting your creative path, and look out for more insights on animation in our upcoming sessions!
i'm actually sitting in um in the black hoodie and my legs are wrapped up with a t-shirt
because it's kind of chewy in the morning here in wyoming um yeah and my slippers sadly
it really helps us out yeah but if you're too lazy that's okay it's understandable
we're gonna wait three more minutes because i decided to delay the stream by five minutes so
your workstations and the environment you're at in when you're listening to lectures and
bigger than we are you know it's like um it's like in those cartoons or or in a in a movie battle when you know
there's 300 spartans and the world is big and the enemy is big and what we do is we we simulate that we're bigger than
we actually are i'm really proud of our community by the way guys uh it's small and awesome
um all right one minute till we start 14 out of 10. yeah i'm pretty proud of what we built guys
i'm pretty proud everyone is not left behind everyone is being super productive and wholesome by the way uh
people who are not up to date we have a new channel in our discord it's called pitch meetings
and on that pitch meetings channel what we do we give an opportunity to you guys to present your idea
inspired project and we listened to it and gave our couple of cents and it was awesome just treat it
as you know as an opportunity to test out your storytelling skills and explanational skills and pitching skills
and then we're going to be doing a pitch meeting every week as long as people want to pitch their projects to an
uh yeah prepare prepare a pdf uh if you want to learn more about it you know join the q a session afterwards and i
should know if you want to pursue that career and what qualities you should possess to pursue that career
this is a script for the incredibles and as you can see the storyboard artist was reading the script and then making
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
color scripting starts what is the color scripting process so first is understanding the story to the
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
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
you know suckier and suckier and suckier little note when you are a color scripter sometimes
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
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
the mood of this world without anything happening to it is it always moody and always like happy is it this or that
the dark knight is always gruesome and scary why because that's the universe that it lives in that's the baseline
a default state of your world and that's what we did before we started going to actual storyboarding color scripting we
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
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
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
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
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
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 would i would call it color script and then there's color boards are they the same thing almost so let me
movie barcodes or movie color barcodes do you know what it is well a movie color barcode is when you
or where you are color scripting your job is technically imagine this an emotional progression through color
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
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
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
it's basically monochrome right because when we're talking about movies in general uh
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
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
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
let's say with oranges and red and something else and then i have a last moment where they fight
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
do is i can connect the in-betweens of those things and see how i can lead up from for example a
lighting very blue time of day right so because every storyboard or every color script where every frame has to come in
a bird's eye view first to yourself plan all the key moments here here here here and here in the
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
again color script and color strips are different things so let me make a note color script
again see in this movie i'm pretty sure that the color scripter that came to incredibles i think this is incredibles
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
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
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
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
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
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
you just you just don't have the ability to jump into the color script or anything else
is purely with color and let me demonstrate you how i usually do it when i receive a storyboard or an animatic so
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
in a weird looking line and all doesn't make sense to you right i'm pretty sure all of you like if you
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
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
this is some local colors and this is the highlight color of sometimes just one frame if it's too
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
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
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
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
is his spear for example and here's his nose and stuff like that but but i don't need to do that
thing like the entire thing i would probably fill in with blue why well because most of the things here are
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
bloody boom for example and those notes are going to be very useful to myself later on because what i can do with
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
or one emotional moment goes to another emotional moment when you are creating your color keys and again
probably saying but misha i have no idea what each color represents what how do i represent sadness how you represent this
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
imagine the whole story and then you can pick the main emotional moments and see how they colorate and match one into
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
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
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
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
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
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
defined they would just have this a simple statement and then a liberate more on it and push