Colour to create style

Recently, I've been keeping an eye on the popular video game, "Mirrors Edge". Although I could write an essay on what I know about it, what I'd like to focus on is the colour theme of the game. The game mainly uses very bright, simple colours, mainly only white, red and blue. This clean, modern look is very deliberate, making the city look bright and cheerful, which is one of the key themes of the game. In the game, the colour red is only ever used as a pointer in the game, highlighting objects which the player can use to progress. This can be seen in the image above. Colour is used in other media too, for example in "The Matrix" and "Kill Bill". In "The Matrix, each scene has a distinctive colour theme, from the dirty green which is used a lot while in a building the matrix, the orange used in the oracle's house and the white in the empty room in the matrix. Each of these colours have distinct meanings; the green is used to emphasize how diseased and wrong the matrix is, as well as relating to the florescent greens seen in the code of the computers; the orange is used to make the room seem warm, comfortable and cosy, which is significant in the scene, where an old lady is seen comfortably baking cookies while talking to Neo; and in the bright white loading room, where white stereotypically shows hope and confidence, the completely empty mise-en-scene lets the white take on a new meaning: potential- Neo is faced with a room to be filled. ("Guns. Lots of guns")
The highly stylised Kill Bill uses the same techniques, especially in the scenes near the end of the film, the crazy 88 fight scene and the final showdown in the snow. The crazy 88's are all dressed in black and white suits, which makes them all look the same, which fits in to the idea that the crazy 88 is one pack. Although not visible in the DVD version of the film, the original kept that scene in colour, so the bright yellow jumpsuit makes The Bride stick out clearly, which keeps her separate from the rest of the monochrome characters. The fight against O-Ren Ishii is even more carefully stylised, featuring O-Ren Ishii dressed in a white kimono against a backdrop covered in perfect white snow. In the other corner, The Bride, dressed in yellow stands against a yellow background. This separation of colour shows that The Bride has dominated the yellow building, and O-Ren Ishii has the garden, covered in her colour; white. The characters now use these places as their sides, much like in a boxing match with the red and blue sides.

Although our thriller intro is already filmed, there will be a lot of time to change many things in the editing stage, and colour themes are one thing I will definitely bear in mind, even if at a simple "black = evil; white = good" stage, although our film is very ambiguous when it comes to good and evil, so even this may be difficult. I would like to play with the way that strong colour can create a pathway for the character, like in "Mirrors Edge". This could be achieved using silhouettes in our thriller quite easily. Using colour to show which side a character is on could also be useful, and we could try to mix this in with the use of the 180 degree rule to further separate the characters, or maybe even to separate the characters from objects. This has a lot of potential, and I will write about if or how we used colour in our thriller in our conclusion at the end of the project.