Basics of Cinematography: Color

Basics of Cinematography: Color

Featuring Beetlejuice and Napoleon Dynamite

Color affects the tone and mood of a scene

For instance, when Barbara and Adam first travel to the ghost realm (Beetlejuice), the eerie, green light shines under the door. Lydia doesn't know what is happening on the other side of the door, but the light on her face highlights her reaction and creates and mood of suspense.

Blue and black are used repeatedly in Beetlejuice as well.

Black is often used to up the mysterious feeling, and the use of cool colors, such as blue, is meant to highlight a lack of warmth in the scene. The Deetz family is not particularly warm to each other, and their home feels cold and lacks coziness.

Colors are also associated with characters.

Otho is consistently associated with black and red. When a character is often associated with this color combination, we can infer they are a rather insidious character. While Otho is ultimately revealed to be an incompetent buffoon, he is greedy, deceitful, and unsympathetic toward others.

When Beetlejuice punishes Otho

he turns his outfit into a baby blue, 1970s disco suit. It's not modern. It's colorful. It's terrifying to Otho. It's the perfect punishment.

More on that eerie, green light though...

In Beetlejuice, it's specifically associated with the dead. It's in the ghost realm, and it is the color that appears during the séance. It adds suspense every time it appears. During the séance scene, we are hoping Barbara and Adam will be saved by Otho's botched attempt to simply contact them.

Color can also enhance a general motif as well,

which can help drive the central message/theme home. In Napoleon Dynamite, we often see colors together that create an awkwardness. The general message of the movie concerns teenage awkwardness being timeless. (Seriously, who paints lockers that way?)

Uncle Rico here

has stars on a bright pink background with a brown shirt and blue vest to pose for this picture. This combination doesn't go together. Granted, Uncle Rico is not himself a teenager, but he is stuck in his teenage years, unable to move on after that one football game just didn't go his way in 1982.

It was popular to own appliances in the 1970s-80s that were olive green, pink, yellow, and such.

Napoleon Dynamite features similar decor and colors (and costumes) to those times in order to make the audience feel uncomfortable in our contemporary world. It makes us feel awkward.

Open Ended

What movie or show do you know of that you could draw similar connections to based on this information? (Is there a character from a show or movie connected to a certain color? Or perhaps a color or combination that you've noticed is repeatedly used in a movie or show, and what do you believe it means?)