Hello! My name is Rachel Lincoln and I’m a senior at BASIS Scottsdale. As I finish my last few months in high school, I will be exploring one of my academic and personal passions outside the classroom, in the form of a research project. I’ve been taking art classes for years in school, and I’ve tried my hand at many mediums, but one specifically has fascinated me—animation. Though animation is pretty far out of my artistic comfort zone, it does share common elements with other art forms; of particular interest to me is the importance of color. In my research project, I will explore how color shapes and bolsters emotion and plot by creating my own animated short film.
Since its inception, animation has been a wildly popular method of storytelling. It allows so much freedom with color, which can affect our interpretation of a narrative enormously. In animated scenes where no detail is random or happenstance, color becomes a tool with immense potential. Why does nearly every Disney villain wear red, purple, or black? Why are Sith Lords’ lightsabers red? In a medium as visual as film, color is just as vital as plot to the success of a story. Color contributes to characterization, determines the atmosphere of an environment, and creates powerful symbolism.
Led by Disney, animation studios have been producing more vibrant films, especially after the introduction of digital techniques made coloring simpler. Now animators can easily take advantage of colors’ connotations to affect the mood of a scene in very specific, deliberate ways. The thoughtful use of color in movies like Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and Spirited Away fascinates me and has inspired me in the past to choose unusual colors when working on projects in traditional mediums; I want to direct that inspiration back to the source and try my own hand at drawing a color-conscious film.
With the help of my mentor Peter Hannan, I will further my Photoshop fluency and learn how animate digitally. But the focus of my research lies beyond the technical aspects, in more organic and arguably subjective territory. By looking at landmark examples of films throughout the history of animation, and with a healthy does of my own intuition, I will examine how the use of color has changed and apply my findings to my own film as I experiment with narrative and color.
At the moment I’m just beginning to conceptualize my short, but I’ll soon start researching and animating in earnest. You can read more about my project here. Until next time,
Rachel
