Sunday, January 8, 2012

The Color Blue in Toy Story 3

The new book, “The Art of Pixar: The Complete Color Scripts” presents the color planning and concept art behind all of the Pixar features and shorts.
Pixar’s color stylists often associate certain colors with certain emotions. In Toy Story 3, the color blue has special significance. 

The film’s director Lee Unkrich explains, ‘We came up with the concept of blue connoting safety and home. At the beginning of the film, Andy...his bedroom is blue, the sky is blue, his T-shirt is blue.

“He is in blue jeans, he’s got a blue car--these are not accidents. These are conscious choices. Everything in the movie is there for a reason. 

We are making a commitment to say that blue will connote safety and trying to avoid that in situations where we don’t want the audience to feel safe.’” 
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Digital color scripts by Dice Tsutsumi 
Art copyright by Disney/ Pixar

8 comments:

  1. the use of such vibrant colors reminds me of an animator/concept artist I whom I've always liked, named Yarrow Cheney. I love how bright and childlike his concept art looks. The Pixar color comps remind me a lot his art.

    http://www.yarrowcheney.com/Portfolio/Yarrow_Cheney.html

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  2. James,

    Per the advice of your website I'm going to drop this totally irrelated art question here. Have you ever thought about doing a book specifically about history painting? I feel like there aren't any good books on it out there, though I'm not sure if one of those Atelier-revival books has anything on it. They seem mostly to focus on technique, and leave out research, organization, staging. I know your imaginative realism deals with this somewhat (prop making, ect) but I'd like to know how you approach an historic, academic subject?

    If you get time to answer any of this in any way, not least of which is simply writing a new book, then thanks!

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  3. Edward, it's a good idea, but most of the core information I have to offer about history painting is already in Imaginative Realism. The steps are the essentailly same as they would be for fantasy art or any imaginative painting. The main difference is the approach to research and documentation.

    William, thanks for the link.

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  4. Its not just colours its also in other types of symbolisms.
    That’s why I love doing the research when working on a project. It really makes the story alive behind the image or cartoon/animation idea. Got to love books, internet, movies and beyond

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  5. I found a style of cinematic storytelling something similar to this. If you go through the color swatches used in "American Beauty," you can see how each defining moment of the film is signified by a change in color. In short it's just amazing how color instigates something psychological to its viewers.

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  7. This is an excellent book. I received it for Christmas and was quite impressed with the tremendous work and thought that went into creating these color scripts. Color is such a powerful tool in an artist's arsenal. When used effectively, as in Pixar's case, the results are stunning!

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