Friday 11 March 2016

Sequential Imagery: Colour Scripts as story treatments


Pixar is an Animation Studio that excels in it's visual storytelling. While their writing is indeed top notch the most immediately noticeable and memorable aspect of any of their film's is the striking visuals and I believe this is partially due to how well they plan their stories thorough the use of colour scripts.


Most studios, when working on a feature film will start off with a written story treatment, a short summary of the film's events which informs the creation of the script and storyboarding stages of pre-production. While this is still the case at Pixar, alongside the traditional story treatment artists will create a visual summary of all the events in the film for the artists and director to use as inspiration when storyboarding and constructing scenes. These colour scripts, when shown in succession resemble a sort of illustrated storybook which summarises the outcomes and core conflicts and focus of key scenes in the film. Each film Pixar has used this process with has adopted a different approach in style for this too, for example, in keeping with the 1950s modernist aesthetic, reflective of golden age comic book superheroes, The Incredibles adopts a vector based, almost Saul Bass-like style for it's colour script, while a film like Ratatouille uses more traditional media in keeping with the aesthetic of the Parisian setting.

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