How Hollywood uses colour to manipulate our emotions

Film-makers routinely use colour to exploit the emotions of their audiences

If you like movies you may have noticed that certain film genres always seem to share the same shades of colour; warm reds for romances, de-saturated tones for apocalyptic dystopias, blue cold-tones for horror movies. The list goes on.

This doesn’t happen by accident. Colour has the power to influence our emotions, without us even realising it. And film-makers know this.  For decades they’ve exploited the powerful emotional effects of colour to help tell their stories.

This short video by The Verge takes a fascinating look behind the scenes of the colour-tweaking experts of Hollywood, and how and why they choose the colours they do. Oh, and you can also learn what’s so special about blue and orange….

Leave a comment