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Color Scripting - Intro & Coffee Run

Learn how to approach color scripting for your project by asking key questions and how we tackled the process for Coffee Run.
  • Article
  • 31 Dec 2024
  • 10 min read
Vivien Lulkowski
Vivien Lulkowski Concept Artist

Other Authors

Julien Kaspar
Julien Kaspar CG Artist
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The aftermath of a 2D and 3D collision (Wing It!)
The aftermath of a 2D and 3D collision (Wing It!)

In 2020 I joined the team as a mostly 2D concept artist. Since then my skillset evolved with all the diverse challenges encountered during Open Movie productions and most notably - the sheer exposure to the keen eyes and minds of 3D artists. It's been a blast to be right where 2D and 3D collide... and occasionally crash and burn! Looking back through the lense of a former freelancer, it's clear that all the most valuable insights emerged from getting to stick around for when the smoke had settled and stuff needed to be fixed somehow...

This three part series of blog posts aims to unpack the accumulated knowledge that fits under the broader umbrella of color scripting. This has been the throughline of my responsibilities here and so I wanted to share the journey so far. I'll start out with why you might want to employ a color script and how to start out and then continue to share insight into my thinking and the trials and respective solutions as encountered during the makings of Coffee Run, Sprite Fright and Wing It!.

A clever guiding light

In the grand scheme of things color scripting is trying to tell the story with color (and light) in any way that is beneficial to the storytelling.

That could mean ...

  • heightening emotion
  • visualizing an underlying conflict or theme present in the story
  • representing change in a character or environment
  • adding stress and unease or promising a peaceful time to the audience
  • orienting the audience in time and space
  • communicating the level of abstraction of reality in a fictional universe
  • clueing the audience in that a musical bit is about to happen

...anything really!

Do 10 seconds of animation need a color script? Before starting out on the matte paintings for Cowboi, I wanted to plan how the characters overlap with the backgrounds. I discovered a nice opportunity to frame Cowboi charging and punching against the reds of the lit buildings - he is a bull after all!
Do 10 seconds of animation need a color script? Before starting out on the matte paintings for Cowboi, I wanted to plan how the characters overlap with the backgrounds. I discovered a nice opportunity to frame Cowboi charging and punching against the reds of the lit buildings - he is a bull after all!

A color script can do some serious heavy lifting for you in tandem or in addition to what is being communicated otherwise. In other words: Color can expose another facet of a story, not unlike a good picture book, that doesn’t just illustrate what happens in the text. More often than not you won’t want to fully go against what is “said” unless there is a good reason to introduce purposeful dissonance, but it is an option to keep in mind.

Identifying untapped potential

There is such variety in what role your color script may play in your project, that it can be tricky to identify all the opportunities you might have. I suggest starting out by asking some general questions, that are relevant to just about any story:

  • How does the character change (in relationship to their environment)?
  • How do they change their environment or other characters?
  • How does it change how we feel about them by the end of the story? Or their environment?
  • Does the meaning of any other major element of the story get reframed by the end?

Then “simply” mirror these story beats with color and light! Consider how they can be translated into more abstract visuals like:

  • How much space does a color take up on screen?
  • How does this change across the runtime of the movie?
  • How is the color influenced by light/takes on the characteristic of its environment vs how much does it resist that influence?
  • Does a color disappear from the movie only to show back up later on?
  • Do some moments in the story ask for drastic shifts in color and contrast or more subtle changes that can fly under the radar at first?
  • What are the preexisting color associations to an important element? Can you use them as a shorthand, challenge them or is there room to create new ones?

It’s good to be decisive with how sudden and dramatic an adjustment in color and lighting is. Abrupt swings can serve a comedic or dramatic purpose and more gradual changes can fly under the radar of perception until a smooth change in mood is achieved. Sudden red alarm lights are definitely the first case!
It’s good to be decisive with how sudden and dramatic an adjustment in color and lighting is. Abrupt swings can serve a comedic or dramatic purpose and more gradual changes can fly under the radar of perception until a smooth change in mood is achieved. Sudden red alarm lights are definitely the first case!

Just say the obvious!

You can also note your goals as simple statements: I want the audience to suddenly be a lot more worried for the characters here! Or: I want this place to start feeling more comfortable as the characters get used to it.

Often these assessments seem overly obvious, but it can help a lot to make the implicit explicit and share the goals you set with the team. Maybe the director or art director can cover this in their brief for you or you happen to be the person directing the color artist and you can provide these statements to offer extra clarity.

Noting down the audience reaction that you are aiming for can be as simple and silly as this example. This way you can very quickly check with the team if you are heading in the right direction. There is really no need to overcomplicate things while you are approaching the color script from this angle :)
Noting down the audience reaction that you are aiming for can be as simple and silly as this example. This way you can very quickly check with the team if you are heading in the right direction. There is really no need to overcomplicate things while you are approaching the color script from this angle :)

Cornerstones are lava!

During the translation process of these statements into a color script you most likely have to keep the constraints of the production in mind!

It might very well be that the local colors of the characters, the time of day, the colors of specific locations are set in stone. Always make sure you are in the clear about what is already decided and keep track of it in a way that keeps it present while working.

Usually these "restrictions" become the most helpful cornerstones while you discover more and more wiggle room diving deeper into the project. You might end up building the color script specifically around them!

Don’t forget that while working with the location, painting it, decorating it, lighting it - you can often cheat as long as it doesn´t raise too many questions! Note how the barn itself is quite dark and moody, but seen through the window it is a much lighter peachy tone. Almost not believable, but inconspicuous enough in a cartoon to hit the right notes.
Don’t forget that while working with the location, painting it, decorating it, lighting it - you can often cheat as long as it doesn´t raise too many questions! Note how the barn itself is quite dark and moody, but seen through the window it is a much lighter peachy tone. Almost not believable, but inconspicuous enough in a cartoon to hit the right notes.

The shape of a color script

Most color scripts end up being a grid of frames, but to start things off you can imagine your whole movie as one short strip and try to tell the whole story within that limited space. This can force you to condense things down to the essential, make the big statement first and see if it can be understood just based on that.

I did not work on Spring and Charge so these are just my terrible reenactments of a nutshell color script to make it extra, EXTRA unthreatening to try and give this a go :) Boiling these very different movies down to "bring shiny thing home, world is much improved" was certainly an exercise in brevity.
I did not work on Spring and Charge so these are just my terrible reenactments of a nutshell color script to make it extra, EXTRA unthreatening to try and give this a go :) Boiling these very different movies down to "bring shiny thing home, world is much improved" was certainly an exercise in brevity.

Some stories might even lend themselves to a different shape. Quest type stories like Heist or Spring in which the protagonist ventures into the unknown (or seemingly unknown) and returns back having retrieved some form of treasure (often representing a newly found wisdom or strength) can potentially be put into circular form. Try and experiment while in the early stages of color scripting and you might find a new interesting angle to approach colors and lighting!

Going full circle for Coffee Run

The color script of Coffee Run started as a wheel. In this case the format seemed appropriate due to the movie's looping structure and curved layout.

All sections got more refinement as we went along, but the wheel helped to summarize all the input I got from director Hjalti Hjálmarsson and established a ground truth I could always come back to reference.

The trickiest part with making this color script work for the movie were the intense swings in mood and color between scenes. They were appropriate given the nature of the project, but in order to not be too harsh on the eyes we looked out for swift, but softened transitions, whenever possible.

These slidy ramps in the movie gave us plenty of room for gradients as you can see!
These slidy ramps in the movie gave us plenty of room for gradients as you can see!

While we used these sections inbetween the set pieces for the softest transitions, there is still lots of intense moments like entering the hospital backroom, where the colorscript matches a sudden change in emotion and movement in the animation.

Note how there is still some continuity with colors being carried over between scenes. I like to call these "color bridges". In *Coffee Run* they helped to preserve a sense of unstoppable flow by tying things together.
Note how there is still some continuity with colors being carried over between scenes. I like to call these "color bridges". In *Coffee Run* they helped to preserve a sense of unstoppable flow by tying things together.

In addition to "color bridges" we used the watercolor bloom effect that floods the scenes with new colors as the protagonist enters. This communicates how each memory is charged with a different emotion and how quickly she gets immersed into snippets from the past as she bounces between them.

This watercolor effect helped us to transition between colors in an interesting and swift way!

Establishing visual hierarchy

For Coffee Run the colors that were set in stone were the character’s hair colors and the white elements in every set piece. Those white items are a key element for each memory, that needs to be quickly identifiable and trackable by the viewer. It made my life much easier that they can simply be a pure white.

A woman about to throw the memory of her cat out the window. The "interactable" elements of each scene are nicely highlighted by being a pure white!
A woman about to throw the memory of her cat out the window. The "interactable" elements of each scene are nicely highlighted by being a pure white!

It was important to create an obvious visual hierarchy because the protagonist Hail/Hailey is on screen twice in every environment. The main version of her that we follow (called Hail) is less affected by the light situation than the version captured in the memory (called Hailey by the team). Hail also has white eyes while Hailey has none, a very obvious visual clue! The background characters that aren't all that important blend into the atmosphere fully and appear as flat cut out silhouettes.

Hail, Hailey and the background characters had to be easy to distinguish for the viewer to follow the action.
Hail, Hailey and the background characters had to be easy to distinguish for the viewer to follow the action.

When these solutions seemed to work, I could just follow the established logic and get into painting each scene in detail still referencing that very simple wheel color script!

The only scene that we deviated quite far from after all is the restaurant scene on the balcony roof. That one became a sunset rather than a night scene, but the stark reds were somewhat preserved.
The only scene that we deviated quite far from after all is the restaurant scene on the balcony roof. That one became a sunset rather than a night scene, but the stark reds were somewhat preserved.

The layout and most of the animation were already pretty much done when I got on board so I had an easy time stitching screenshots together and working on top very directly. I got a week to paint each scene, including spelling out textures, set dressing with props and messing around with lighting effects.

This might be the only painting that got a quick color comps pass for exploration. For the most part this was skipped to get things done quickly and because I had a pretty clear image in mind of what Hjalti wanted.
This might be the only painting that got a quick color comps pass for exploration. For the most part this was skipped to get things done quickly and because I had a pretty clear image in mind of what Hjalti wanted.

All the final paintings were matched almost exactly in 3D. A lot of that is owed to Andy translating the stylistic decisions of the concept art for a 3D production and Julien putting in that extra effort to cheat the hell out of perspective to match the paintings. For something that was seemingly more on the experimental side the process was extremely streamlined - not too much running in circles on this production after all!

Auf Wiedersehen!!

That's it for an introduction to color scripting and for what I have to say about Coffee Run. I hope this is insightful and will continue to be so in the next part of this blog post series that will cover the color scripting process of Sprite Fright - coming up soon!

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