Transcripts
1. Course Trailer: Welcome to Motion Designers
Guide to color theory. This is how to easily pick effective colors in
six simple steps to make your ideas shine? Look professional,
get noticed and communicate your message
clearly. Watch closely. Be the color is the
difference between a professional motion designer and an amateur motion designer. But how do you exactly
pick effective colors? What top animators
know that we do? Asked myself these
questions after spending a month on my
first explainer video, and my client rejected it. Now, the client came
to a conclusion that the colors were just awful
and I agreed with them. But they also overlooked my animation efforts
because of the bad colors. That's when I decided
to crack the code. I devoured books and
videos and analyzed hundreds of motion design
pieces all to understand color. The result, Well, I was able to create a system to pick
effective colors that made my work look
professional and I was able to communicate my
client's message clear. Mastering color
with this system, I was able to land
high profile clients like and Acas by Jews. Now, who is this course for? This course was created with
motion designers in mind. But we will explore principles that are fundamental to
visual communication. If you are a graphic designer, editor, or even filmmaker, or even YouTuber, you will find valuable takeaways to
allevate your creative work.
2. Class Project: For the class project, all you have to do is share the color palette of
your last animation, just apload the color palette, describe the colors you
used, why you used it, and how they make viewers feel, and then describe the emotion that the color palette
could be creating. Even if you don't know, just describe whatever
comes to your mind.
3. Beginner's Dilemma: We ever felt like picking
colors is a guessing game. Well, if you did,
you are not alone. If you're someone like
me who doesn't come from a graphic designer or even
animation background, then you are going to
have a hard time with colors because colors don't
walk with guess work. And clients don't
pay you to guess. They pay you to get results. And in this journey
of motion design, you are going to face
especially color theory. You're going to
face two hurdles. The first one is
that the Internet is going to be really
overwhelming and exhausting. So without a graphic designing or motion
design background, the sheer volume of
color theory information online is going to be really
confusing and exhausting. You are going to go
through the tons of video, but you are not going to have that system which
gets you results. And then they end up
making you feel like picking color is just
a guessing game, and they leave you
even more confused. But I want to tell you that
it's not a guessing game, and there is a system
that can help you. This course is
designed for that. The other hurdle that
you are going to face is that once you are frustrated
with color election, some beginners might
copy existing palette. Now, this can make your
look superficially good, but it doesn't teach you how to choose colors for your
own unique stories. Right? You're not going to
develop your own taste. You're not going to develop
your own systems for that, and you are just going
to be some other person. And I don't want you to do that. Mimicing others might create
visually appealing results, but it doesn't develop
your own creative voice. The effective colors for your
animation will depend on the specific story
you are telling and the emotions
you want to evoke in your audience. Now,
this course can help. So by offering a
structured approach to color picking
or color choosing, this course aims to
bridge that gap. This course gives you every
knowledge, every tool, every system that you need in order to
confidently choose color, and it's not that complicated as the Internet is making it. It's really simple. And not only you are going to make
stuff look good, but also enhance your
animations message, impact, and hopefully
gain more clients.
4. Effective Colors Vs Bad colors: What is the difference between a bad color and an
effective color? In my opinion, color
choices in design can be categorized by
their effectiveness in connecting with the audience. Sounds too complicated,
right? But don't worry. So there aren't
inherently bad colors, but some selections resonate
better than the others. Effective colors evoke emotions
and effectively convey and connect you
with your audience or convey your message
to your audience. They create a connection
with viewers and have a tendency to leave
a lasting impression. For example, imagine you are designing a
party invitation. A bad color choice
would be pale, grey text on a white background. It might be clear what it says, but it's going to be boring and unlikely to grab
anyone attentions. No one wants to go
to a boring party, at least, I don't want to. Well, to be honest, I don't
get invited to any party. On the other hand, an effective color
choice would be bright, fun color like yellow text
on a bold blue background. Now, this is eye
catching and exciting, just like a party you
would want to attend, but I'm still not getting
invited to the party. Is the effective colors like the party invitation make
people feel something. In this case, makes them feel excited and happy and
communicates the message. Now this creates
a connection with the audience and makes them
more likely to respond, hopefully attend the party.
5. Color Vocabulary: This is probably the most
boring chapter in this course, but it is important to understand this concept
so that you don't miss out on further explanations so make sure that you don't
skip this chapter. So what is color theory? First of all, Color theory
is the language of colors. It helps us understand
how colors relate to each other and how they
affect our perception. Okay? So first of all,
let's see colors. There are three basic
categories of colors, primary colors, secondary
colors, and tertiary colors. Primary colors are
the foundation colors that cannot be created
by mixing other colors. Traditional color will
typically uses red, yellow, and blue as
a primary colors. So basically, red,
yellow, and blue, are primary colors. Then
there are secondary colors. Now, secondary
colors are created by mixing two primary colors. So common secondary
color includes orange, which is created by
mixing red and yellow. Then there is green, which is created after mixing
yellow and blue, and we have violet, which is created after
mixing red and blue. And the last category of
colors is the tertiary colors. These colors are
formed by mixing primary color with an
adjacent secondary color. There are sick tertiary color
on a standard color wheel. Now, before we move
on to color wheel, I want to explain
some color properties that are important so
that you understand. The first color property is hue. What is a hue? Hue is
an actual color itself. And when I'm saying red, red is a hue. Then there is value.
What is value? The lightness or
darkness of a color is value. And there is saturation. Saturation shows the
intensity of a color. A more saturated color
is richer and bolder, while less saturated one is darker and more dull.
And there is tint. So tint makes a color
lighter by adding white. And then there is shade, which makes a color darker
by adding black to it. Black to the color. So these are the basic color properties. Now let's see color wheel.
So a color wheel is circular diagram,
it's a diagram that visually represents the
relationship between colors. Now, this is the most
important tool that we're going to use to
determine the colors. But there are online tools
that can help us do that, so you don't have to go
much deeper into that, but it's a helpful
tool to create color harmony and color palette that we
are going to need. Now let's move on to the final, and that is color harmony. Color harmony is basically color combinations that look
good and that are effective. Traditionally, there
are many color harmony, but here we are going to
go through a few of them. The first one is
complimentary colors. These are the colors that
are located directly opposite on each other on the wheel like red and
green, blue and yellow. They create a high
contrast vibrantl and it grabs attention. Then there is analogous. Now, these are the
colors that are adjacent to each
other on the wheel, like blue, blue,
green, and green. They create a calming
and harmonious feel. It's good for the creating
that peaceful environment, than there is triadic colors. These are the colors
evenly spaced on the wheel like red,
yellow, and blue. They offer a bit
more variety than complimentary colors
while maintaining balance. Then there is monochromatic, which
I really like. Monochromatic is it uses
variations of a single color. For example, light blue, dark blue, and teal. Now it creates a clean
and sophisticated look. These are the basic color vocabries that you need to know, make sure that you
understand them. There isn't much to
it, but these are the basic things that you
must know and must remember.
6. Purpose Of Picking Effective colors: The purpose of picking
effective colors is going to sound underwhelming to some people because
the purpose of effective color is not
to allevate the story. Although it could sometimes allevate the story
at some point, but the purpose of
effective color is to make the story an animation more
cohesive and more impactful. It cannot always
allevate the story. The thing about
the colors is that effective colors may not have that ws impact
on the story, but bad color will have a
greater impact on the story. It's not a good
impact, by the way, and it will make you
look unprofessional, and it will leave like bitter taste in the
audience's mouth. Let's take an example of VFX. Almost every movies these
days have visual effects. For example, the movie joker that came out had so
many visual effects, but they were so real
that so many of us, myself included,
didn't even knew that there were effects included
in this movie, right? And so this is the thing that when visual effects are good, they are so real that we
cannot tell the difference. But when it's bad,
you can clearly know and tell the VFX is bad. And this is the same
thing with colors. Okay. Effective color choices create a cohesive
and impactful story. They certainly guide
your audience's emotions and keep them engaged. And you have to remember this, because you have picked
effective colors doesn't mean it's going
to get your results. And this is the
truth that may be so hard to digest
for some of us. On the other hand,
bad color choices disrupt the experience. People are going to overlook
your efforts to animate. From this, I can conclude that the ultimate goal of color in animation is to support this story and connect
with the audience. Okay? It helps you achieve
your plans goals by creating a strong
emotional impact. And I want you to remember this that good animation
and good motion design and good design is invisible. It works so well that you
don't even notice it, but bad design screams for attention and
not in a good way.
7. Principle Of Picking Effective colors: The principle of selecting effective colors is
straightforward. The colors you choose
should directly evoke the feelings or emotion you want your audience to
experience and feel. Whether you are a graphic
designer, motion designer, or even interior designer, this principle remains timeless and
universally applicable. Every color has the power to influence emotions
and perceptions, and making this principle both simple and
profoundly important. The formula is pretty simple. Emotion you want your
audience to feel is directly proportional
to the color you pick. Okay? It's that simple. Now, different color tends
to evoke different emotions, and some color can also vary
depending on the culture, so you have to be mindful. For example, color red could
be associated with passion, love, but it can also be associated with
excitement and danger. While orange color could be associated with
energy enthusiasm, warmth, fun, yellow, could be
associated with happiness, optimism, creativity, while blue can be associated
with praise with peace, trust, calmness, and it can also be associated with sadness. Green could be associated with nature, growth,
harmony, freshness. Purple could be associated with luxury, creativity,
wisdom, mystery. So different colors are going
to have different meanings based on the context and the combination
that you are picking. For example, imagine
you are designing a promotional video for
a luxury spa, okay? Now, the client wants to reach
out to women in their 40s. To convey a sense of relaxation, sophistication,
and comfort, you might use a color palette
dominated by soft blues, green, or things and
mostly new tunes. Now, this colors can help create a serene and really
peaceful atmosphere aligning with this pas brand and the experience
that it offers. Here, using the dynamic colors, bold colors like orange, red, wouldn't do great. Okay, so you have to
keep this in mind, and you have to keep
your audiences in mind. You always have to
keep your audience in mind when you are going
to pick colors, a
8. The Six Step System: Chapter, I'm going to teach you the system of picking
effective colors. It's really simple. Here is how to create primary
color palette. Step one is to identify what you want your
audience to feel. Here, perfectly identify
and define what is the end emotion your audience may feel and pick one emotion. Step two, now pick or color based on the emotion you
want your audience to feel. Step three. Once the
core color is picked, use different color
schemes and create a color palette based on the core color.
Here is an example. Now, I want audience
to feel trust. So I'm going to pick color and here I'm going
to pick blue color. Now, based on this color, I'm going to use color wheel and color harmony to create
primary color palette, and that's how simple it is. Once that is done, lay out
your storyboard and pick an emotion for each key moments or for each scene if you want. And by the way, the key
moments are the scenes in which something really
important is happening. And once emotions are picked, for the moments, we create color script from
these emotions. So what is a color script? So a color script
is our roadmap for the emotions we want to
evoke in each scene. Okay? Here, we take the primary color
palette we have already picked and adjust them according to the feeling
that we want to evoke. This is called color script. So a happy scene might have
bright cheerful colors while a scary scene might use darker
and more mysterious tones. If you're confused
here, don't worry. I'm going to give you a
detailed example on this. Okay, so stick with me for now. Everything is going to get
clear once we reach examples. Like I said, we
create color script from our primary color palette. How do we do that? You
can do two things here. First, you can either choose accent color based on the
mood. What is an accent color? Accent color is a splash
of color that complements or contrast with the primary color palette that
we have created. Second thing is very simple, all you do is saturate
or desaturate the primary color palette
based on the mood. And I hope everything is
clear about the system.
9. Example 1: Procrastination Gym!: To give you a full
picture of the process, I'll provide two examples. Now, this first one offers
quick process overview. And the next example
will dive deeper. I will show you the
color script in action. And so for the first example, I'm going to create a story
and a rough storyboard. Okay? So this is a story
and a rough storyboard. It goes something like this. A cat who would always take a stroll late at night
with his girlfriend. Was their routine four years. Cat finds out his
girlfriend left him. Cat deletes all his social
media. Cat is depressed. Cat decides to join the gym
called Procrastination Gym. Cat works out and finds out
some character flaws within. Cat also meditates
only to find out he was abandoned by his
parents in his childhood. Cat heals himself. C at finds a beautiful, loyal girlfriend in the gym. A few years later, they
get married. The end. Now, I'm going to use the
system that I already taught you in the last chapters to
create the primary color pal. So I want the audience to
feel motivated and inspired. So here, I'm going
to go with yellow. Now, I'm going to
go to adopt color, and then I'm going to select
complimentary color harmony. And now I'm going to adjust
it until I get what I like. Now, you have to
test out this thing. It doesn't come in instantly, but at least when you have the primary color in your mind, it's going to be really easy. Okay okay? And after
playing around, this is what I get. So we have our primary
color palette. Let's look at our storyboard
and create our color script. So here, I'm going
to pick key moments. Okay? And Keo, I already told
you what are key moments. Key moments are the most
important movement in a story or an explainer
video that you are creating. Okay? And so these
are the key scenes that I think are
really important. Now, next to this,
I'm going to write an emotion I want the
audience to feel. Here, I want them to
feel sad for the cat. So sad or gloomy or depressed
could be the emotion. You could write any one or you could write all. It's okay. Now, when he joins the gym, I want them to feel his anger and dedication
towards getting back up. So I would say, anger
will be the emotion here. And at the end, when he's
sitting with his wife, I want the audience to
feel the joy and love. Now, we are going to
pick an accent color. I already told you what
an accent color is, but an accent color is
a splash of color that complements or contrast with the primary color
palette we have created. So I normally pick
accent color that would break all
the rules, so red. And we will not only be
using accent colors, but also saturating and desaturating the colors
based on the emotion. So here is the final
color script after using both desaturated colors
and accent colors. Okay. It's self explanatory, make sure that you
go through this.
10. Example 2: A Right Circle: Put this system to the test
with another simple script. In this example, I will not only walk you through the
color script itself, but also showcase
the final results. The color script implemented
on the storyboard, meaning I'm going to show you the storyboard
and the style fame. For the people that don't know, storyboard is a representation
of what's going to happen, but it's style frame, for example, let's say
when an animation is done and you take a
screenshirt from that, that's style fame, but we
make it before animating. Okay? So the clients, no. Like sometimes we provide our clients with
style frames as well. So just letting
you know that I'm going to show you
not only storyboard, but style fame along with the sclors so that you
understand this in much detail. Let's get started with
the storyboard and story. So they leaved a
circle among squares, and this squares would
bully this circle because she was different and didn't
fit in the box one day, She went onto a strange road. She tumbled down a slope, rolling on and on until
she found a flat road, and she found herself
among circles who happily welcomed her and she realized she just
needed better circle. Now, she doesn't need
to fit into any boxes, the end. So this is our story. Now the emotion I want
the audience to feel in this extent video is growth, because the character
outgrows the environment. The color associated
with growth is green. Now, if you don't
know what color is associated with
which emotion, you can just use AI
or the resources that I have provided to
find out or just Google. Now with them, you
will intuitively know which color to pick
with which emotion. But for now, you have to use these charts or you
have to use AI or whatever it is available online or at your
hands. Okay okay? Now I'm going into
adopt color and instead of using
complimentary color harmony, I'm going with square because I want to try
something different, and you can try different things and go with the
thing that you like, but make sure that
the primary color that you have selected
remains the same. That's the only route. Now,
after a few adjustments, here is my final color palette. Now in this example, I'm going to label every frame. For example, in
the last example, I labeled key moments, but in this, I'm going
to label every motion so that you can understand
it in much detail. Here she feels sad and bullied, here she feels sad and here she feels
depressed and small, and that is also being
reflected in the composition. Just a tip, you can show the characters feelings or their significance by
their sizes as well. Okay? This applies to
product placement as well. Anyways, here she feels lost. Here she feels confused
and scared and lost. Here she feels relieved
but still confused. Here, she feels surprised, and ss is welcomed
by people like her. She feels joy at realization. And in the end, she
feels accepted, and a sense of growth
and joy takes over her. Now, notice the
difference between the first frame and
the last frame. Your character must
undergo massive change, and it doesn't matter
whether you're making an explainer
video or a movie. You have to
exaggerate sometimes, and you have to
show the difference that is before and after. So pay attention to
both the frames, first fame and the end frame. There is a huge difference
between the character. I had to do what I had to do. So I came up with this really simple idea that anyone could
implement, okay? And so that's why I kept
it intensely simple. And remember, it's your
story. You make the rules. Now, I'm going to
create a color script. Here, I'm only going to play with saturation
and desaturation. In the last example, we
also used accent color, which was red, but now I'm going to use only saturation
and desaturation. And here are the results. Also, while adding
the color script, I made some tremendous
changes to the visuals, because in the storyboard,
I felt something was missing and making changes
like this is completely fine. The script and storyboard
aren't set in stones. You have to be flexible and you have to keep adapting
as you move on. You will come up with most ideas when you are creating
color script. By the way, I made this
in illustrator by using some basic shaped tools,
nothing out of the blue. And here I have kept the
main character as green, and here, pay attention
to the background color. We co from almost gray color to white to green at the t.
And this is done intensal. Okay. Black, white, and gray are neutral
colors, by the way. And so if you are
sometimes confused, what color I should use,
and if you don't know, what you can do is
you could go with white and you could
just desaturate the white color until
the environment feels dark if you want to show
emotions that are darker. That way you can saturate and desaturate any color and
make the background. There is a chapter at the end of the course, so don't
worry about that. Anyways, I did this because I want audience to
start feeling sad or at least bad for the circle and end up with a feeling
of growth at the end, you can feel that
to here, right? And so just take a look at this and see how beautiful
colors are, and you can see the significance by comparing the first and the last frame. And so I hope this example
made the process clear
11. Proof: Colors & Story Override bad animation: An design is 80% psychology
and 20% animation. I know how painful this sounds, but let me show you
a real life example. So here I have two
explainer videos. This one has lots of
animation errors. It lacks easing, and some
layers aren't trimmed properly, so it abruptly
appears on screen, and it took me five
days to make this. The second one has
good animation. It has good sound design. And animation flow is pleasing. It took us 70 days
to make this. Okay? Now, let's see the results. Okay? This is going
to surprise you. When this animation
video was published, it was showcased
at a public event. It went on to help my client acquire some great
word of mouth, and they also generated
some clients. Company today is exporting eco friendly products in more than six
countries from India. Now let's take a look
at another video. So this video is made
for was made for an app. This app didn't do well, and they had to
terminate their company. This video was also showcased
at the public event. It did not generate any
impact except people wanted to know who animated this because
it was beautiful. Now, of course, it
makes me feel good, but my clients didn't
get any results, and that was or failure because your job is to
get your clients result. Your job is not to show you how good of an animator
you are, okay? Keep this in mind.
So now let's analyze the difference
between both of them because you can see
the difference, right? One of them is like mediocury, another one is good. Of course, both of them are
pleasing at some point, but I still find that the
first video is really bad. Okay So now let's analyze the key difference
so that you understand. I'm going to show you the
power of color in this, okay? So this video does
one thing correctly. It tells a story both visually
and with colors as well. And at the end, you
tend to feel a relief. Colors and story
walk really well. In this video. This
video is boring, although visually
really pleasing. No change in color or there is no character
in this case, okay? And so there is no arc. There are no color
changes, okay? And so the story
remains plain as we go, and that's why it did not get my clients results
that they wanted, okay? And so this ended up
teaching me two things. First, it doesn't
matter how creative your animation is if you fail
to connect with audience. And the second is that
even poor animation with good visuals or good colors and good storytelling can
override poor animation. In short, visuals,
storytelling and colors have the power
to override animation. So no matter how good of
an animator you become, if you don't tell a
story that moves people or choose color that makes people feel
something different. Because in this case,
look at the first video, like, you could feel
the difference. I don't know why, but
it always at the end, when the family is
standing there. I don't know why, but
there is this sense of joy that runs over
me, it's okay. The Earth is going
to be fine, okay? And that's the thing that you want your audience
to feel. Okay okay? You want to make
them feel different. And the colors, although you may have overlooked
colors always, but now you can understand how these little things could make a huge difference
in your career.
12. Q&A : Everything You need to know(Almost!): Okay, we are in
the final chapter, and I'm pretty sure
that I have missed so many things on this, okay? And so to cover
that up, of course, I cannot cover everything because people have
different views. But I came up with a few questions that
you may have, okay? And I have covered
them in this chapter. And so these are the
questions that you see on the screen. I'm
going to cover this. The first question is, how do I choose background colors or other character colors or
even other object colors? So background will greatly influence the tone of
the animation piece. If your main character
is your main color, then you should try
each color from your color script for the
background and saturate it or desaturate it based on
the emotion you want your audience to feel and choose the one that
looks the best. The background color
has more influence to make sure that you
match it with the emotion. It's sad, any desaturated color could make the
audience feel sad, but it must be used
in the right context, and the same goes for
other characters colors. You just have to try
different colors on it and pick the one that
looks the best from here. Of course, it goes without
saying that you should choose other characters colors from the primary color
palette as well. So make sure that everything
stays continuous, as we have seen in the example. Question number two, what are the tools you use for color? So I don't use many
tools for the colors, but I use colors by a
doop that we already saw. But I also use coolers.com. I don't know if coolers
or cooler colors. I use this website,
and for after effects, I use Motion four to
store my color palette. For inspiration,
I use pinterest. The third question
is, how do you create scripts and storyboards. I normally don't use
any tools for script. They just come to
me intuitively. I do follow the structure. My intuition gives me the idea. Story structure helps me
turn idea into a story. There are many structures
to create stories. I normally don't rely on any one structure,
I use multiple. But here for the example, I'm going to give you
three t structure. So three X structure is a formula for
structuring a story. The three X structure
is a model used in a narrative fiction that divides a story into three
parts or three X, often called the setup, which shows the problem. Then there is confrontation
where you show your character doing something
to solve the problem, and then there is resolution. Here, you show the character
getting the solution. Okay? In the explanator video, this structure is widely used. But in my opinion,
it is over used. There are better ways
to tell stories. But if you can't come
up with any idea, three X structure
will always work. Okay? It always works. In most movies, they
use three X structure. And for the storyboard I U, I may use AI, but I always begin by visualizing
the end result. What I do is, I read script
over and over again, and then visual just start
popping up in my mind, or I might use AI as well. And the fourth question
is related to that. How do I use AI f
colors and visuals? So I normally use
Gemini or Gemini. I don't know Gemini. So
I normally use that. I would give prompt
something like this. So I want my audience
to feel love. My audience is both genders between age of 2030
living in India. What color should I use
to make them feel love? Okay? So this is the
prompt that I use. I might use I haven't used
this, but I might use this. For the composition ideas, for the character ideas, I would also ask Gemini
for composition ideas. For example, create an image of a circle character that is
being bullied by squares. Circle is green and make sure that the image is
flat and two D, make it in a way that
is easy to draw, okay? So I use this prompt to
have that inspiration, and then I created the
storyboard from that. Okay? So this concludes the course. If you have any doubts, don't be shy to ask the
question. I'm here for you. We are in this
together and make sure that you download the
resources as well. And thank you and make sure
that you leave a review. It helps me get
inspired and stay motivated so that I can
bring even better courses. It will also help other students
to find out this course. Okay. So make sure that
you labor review, okay? And I look forward to discussions with you in the
discussion section below. Bye.
Animator's Oasis, Simplifying the complex!
