How to Make a Color Script for Animation Projects

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a color script and how it can help your film or animation. We will be using Adobe Photoshop for the majority of this tutorial, however these skills are transferable to other image editing programs as well.

What You’ll Be Creating

A color script is a sequential visual outline of how you want to map out the color, lighting and emotional beats in an animation or film. This process can be very experimental and is incredible helpful in keeping the look and feel consistent throughout.

Color scripts are also used to convey certain moods in specific parts of a story, or help define how particular colors are linked to certain characters.

What You’ll Learn in This Tutorial

Adobe Photoshop has many different tools that will allow us to create a color script quickly and easily. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to create a color script in order to provide a road map of color and how it can help your film or animation. You’ll learn:

What a color script is and why they are important
How to use color to convey certain moods and emotions in order to support the story
How a color script effects the overall tone and feel of a animation
How to quickly apply script colors to your moodboard

What You’ll Need for Film and Animation Color Scripts

For this tutorial on film and animation color scripts, you will need your own storyboard or some images to create one. For the purposes of this tutorial we will be using some images from Envato Elements:

Sample Image

Color Scripting Helps Visualize the Story

Color is an amazing tool for storytelling. It can be used to express different emotions, clarify motivation and help your audience understand the meanings behind certain scenes. It can be used as a visual map, helping you as the creator to visualise the entire story.

Due to it’s experimental nature, it can also help you evolve your ideas and help you try out different approaches to your storytelling during development.

And finally color scripting also helps maintain a consistent appearance to your animation or film, by keeping each frame similar in look and feel.

The Meaning Behind Colors

Before we begin creating a color script, let’s take a look at the different meanings behind certain colors and how they relate to specific emotions and moods. This will help you what colors to choose depending on what you want to communicate to your audience. It is important to note that colors have different meanings and significance in the different cultures, religions and artistic traditions of the world, so don’t just take our word for it; you’ll need to decide how to use color and color scripting in each new project.

For the purpose of this tutorial we’ll be concentrating on western color symbolism, though again, this has changed really greatly over time and from place to place. There is a huge diversity of opinion, in time and space, about the meaning of color and as such, color scripting.

It’s also possible to create a unique aesthetic and color style for your project, where your story has its own, internal integrity and consistency about color meaning. Here’s what color means in our example color scripting:

Example: Warm Colors

The use of warm colors such as red, yellow and orange can often be associated with the feeling of comfort, joy, extravagance and romance. Red for power, passion, danger and aggression. Brighter warm colors such as yellow, orange, and pink represent happiness, optimism and hope. Use these script colors wisely.

Example: Cool Colors

The use of cold colors such as blue, green, violet or grey can be associated with feelings of loneliness, sadness, mystery, or peacefulness. Understand what you’ll evoke with these script colors.

Define Your Own Associations

Keep going, thinking about all the emotions and colors in your story. What about the emotions in your script? Imagine the colors connected to them, and write those down. Look at the colors in your artwork, what emotions or associations do you feel are connected to the visual story? Write them down.

Define your own associations to come up with the best color scripts for animation in your project.

If you want to learn a bit more about color associating, How to Apply Color Theory in Photo Compositions is a quick read with picture examples.

How to Prepare the Color Script for Animation and Film

Step 1

Using Adobe Photoshop or your image editor of choice, lay out all your frames into one document.

Step 2

Convert all your images to black and white. In Adobe Photoshop, using Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (Control + U) lower the saturation to zero to create a greyscale image.

Step 3

Increase the contrast or your images by adding areas of darkness and light using the Brush Tool (B), an adjustment layer, or the adjustment settings.

Add the Script Colors to the Frames

Step 1

Now that we have prepared our frames it’s time to add the color back in. First decide what emotions or associations you would like to convey for the specific scene and refer back to the section where we discussed The Meaning Behind Colors. With this in mind, choose the most suitable script color that relates to the emotion you wish to convey.

Step 2

Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, or use the Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (Control + U) adjustment. Activate the Colorize option which is usually located in the bottom right corner.

Step 3

Use the Hue and Saturation slider to find the color that you want to use for the frame.

Step 4

If you find that the frame is a little bit too monochromatic, add a mask on your adjustment layer and use the Brush Tool (B) to paint some extra colors back into the frame. You can experiment with the opacity settings for the Brush Tool to carefully bring back some color information into the frame.

Step 5

Repeat the steps for the other frames to create your animation color script.

Awesome! You’re Finished Learning About Film and Animation Color Scripts!

Congratulations! And that’s how to create a color script to help visualise your film or animation. Remember that a color script is a working document that is meant to set the visual tone, and it will change and become more nuanced throughout the development process as you experiment with different colors and try out different approaches to help your storytelling. I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful and I’ll see you next time, on Envato Tuts+!

Post date October 19, 2021

This content originally appeared on Envato Tuts+ Tutorials and was authored by Jonathan Lam

What You'll Be Creating