The Colour of Horror

What is it about?

In this paper, we present a simple method to produce a colour palette for film trailers. Our method extracts the dominant colours from the frames of the trailer and gives more importance to the strong, saturated ones that are likely to be important to the scene. We use our method to generate the palettes of 29 thousand film trailers from 1960 to 2019. We aggregate these palettes by era, genre, and director, and we note various trends in the use of colour over time and between genres. We also show that our generated palettes reflect changes in mood and theme across films in a series, and we demonstrate the palettes of notable directors.

Featured Image

Photo by Nong V on Unsplash

Photo by Nong V on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The colours used in a film are not accidental. Filmmakers use colour as part of the visual story. The colour scheme used in a film or shot can create an emotional overtone; for example, a monochromatic green palette might be used to convey a sickness while a pink palette might convey sweetness or playfulness. Colour can be used associatively, assigning characters or objects specific colours that uniquely identify them and their role in the film. Colour is also used to signal significant changes in plot, or to draw attention to a particular detail within a shot. In the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film "The Shining," for example, several palettes are used. Much of the film is presented with a rich warm palette of dark browns, caramels, oranges, creams, and maroons, contrasted with the occasional blue and green. Certain scenes use a discordant colour, such as the vibrant red bathroom, or room 237, which uses a vibrant green and purple scheme. These vastly different palettes signify a change in emotional state, events, or location of importance. Colour palettes can be created in various ways, such as through manual observation or computing colour frequencies. However, these processes can be laborious, or may not isolate the memorable shades. In previous work, colour palette or theme generation has focused on producing palettes from still images. In this paper, we present a method to automatically produce the colour palette from a video, extracting the dominant colours while avoiding endless shades of grey concrete.