How A Filmmaker’s Palette Shapes Tone

INTRODUCTION

If you look at footage of a scene lit by cool light and then one lit by warm light, how does each frame make you feel?

Does the whiter CCT light feel higher in clarity, more clinical, professional and emotionally distant, while in comparison the warmer light feels more comfortable, cozy and nostalgic? 

The reaction each person has to colour may be highly subjective and dependent on the individual, however I think it’s safe to say that colour does have a subtle effect on how we interpret images and how we feel about them.

3 WAYS TO CONTROL COLOUR PALETTE

Filmmakers have three powerful colour tools at their disposal: production design, lighting, and colour grading. Each plays a distinct but interconnected role in controlling the emotional and visual tone of a story. 

Production design establishes the foundation through the choice of sets, costumes, and props that introduce colour into the space. 

Lighting then determines how those colours are perceived: whether they feel warm and inviting or cold and distant. 

Finally, colour grading refines and unifies the image in post-production, determining things like saturation, contrast, and tint to create a cohesive visual identity. 

1 - PRODUCTION DESIGN

The reason I list production design first is because it probably has the largest impact on the film’s palette. This is because it’s what is in front of the camera, like the colour of the walls, furniture or the props that performers interact with. 

The colour of these sets can be used to support the story. Do The Right Thing positions characters against warm coloured backdrops, like red walls, or interiors full of brown and yellow wooden tones to visually amplify the scorching heat and growing tension in Brooklyn. The warm palette turns temperature into emotion as the environment itself begins to boil over with conflict.

Or, the design can lean totally the other way, in a film like Tár that uses sleek, modern interiors with cool greys, muted blues, and glass surfaces. This palette supports the titular character’s emotional detachment and need for control in a cinematic world drained of warmth and humanity.

Carefully choosing the costumes that characters wear is also an effective and sometimes more cost effective way for filmmakers to control the palette. As the actors and what they wear usually occupy a large amount of screen real estate, and it’s often easier to dress a person than an entire location. 

A show that uses wardrobe colour to influence the tone and thematic interpretations of characters quite effectively is Breaking Bad. This is done by giving key characters a costume colour palette which is roughly followed throughout the series.

Walter White often wears shades of green, which perhaps hints at themes and ideas like sickness, from his cancer diagnosis, as well as his growing greed. Whereas his more reckless, dangerous, impulsive and unpredictable partner Jessie, often wears more saturated, abrasive tones, like reds and yellows. 

These palettes also extend beyond wardrobe into production design, through the vehicles that they drive.

Skyler, his wife, undergoes a very subtle and gradual change in wardrobe palette throughout the series. Starting out in lighter more relaxing tones, like blue, which transitions to black in later seasons as she starts to learn more about her husband’s dark profession. I’m sure there’s also a metaphor about mourning her past life somewhere in there too.

2 - LIGHTING

Other than what is in front of the camera, another way that cinematographers can shape the colour palette is through lighting. 

This is classically done by illuminating scenes with a warmer glow or with a cooler light. They can use a sliding scale of light which measures the CCT colour temperature of sources in Kelvin.

At the warm end there are light sources like candles with a reading of somewhere around 2,000 Kelvin. Or tungsten incandescent sources around 3,200K. This light can feel more romantic, nostalgic or comfortable.

Then there are more neutral 4,300K lights, like fluorescent office tubes, all the way to cooler, 5,600K daylight HMIs, cooler LED sources, or natural light at dusk. Neutral light generally feels a bit more clinical, and appropriate for professional settings like offices, or hospitals, while the cooler we go the more emotionally detached, or even lonely the tone may feel. 

Although of course these emotional interpretations are highly reliant on the subject of the story and mindset of the character. Sometimes specific interpretations of colour theory can remain ambiguous and rather create an overall feeling or tone that runs throughout the film as a whole.

For example, Euphoria is lit with vivid palettes which tend to use either lighting on the more extreme sides of the CCT spectrum or colourful RGB light. These support the emotionally elevated states of the teenage characters. Every part of their young adulthood is intensely and passionately experienced in a heightened way.

Similarly, Ballad Of A Small Player was lit with a vivid neon palette that mixed different types of light sources of different colours: from steely, saturated teal, to warm tungsten practicals and real world RGB signage of all colours. 

Pushing the lighting into saturated RGB tints and away from the regular CCT spectrum of light, visually supported the explosive, manic, panic induced mindset of the gambling addict protagonist. 

Contrast this with the character in I, Daniel Blake, whose plain life, drained of glamour, is depicted though far more realistic, neutral lighting with evenly balanced colour temperatures that don’t push an unnatural spectrum of colour. 

3 - GRADING

After filmmakers have dressed their location, lit and shot it, the final step where they can determine the direction of the palette is during the colour grade.

Although the famous tongue in cheek saying goes, ‘just fix it in post’ it’s normally not advised to stretch the look too far beyond what has been recorded. This is because by this stage the palette of the lighting and set are of course burned into the image.

However, there’s certainly still room at this stage to subtly push the look of the colour in different directions.

The Matrix did this by colour timing scenes that took place in the undesirable digital world in the most unappealing colour they could think of. They added a green tint, especially in the mid tones, to all the scenes that took place in the Matrix world and also digitally enhanced the skies to make them more artificial and white, removing blue. 

These little tweaks moved the palette in this artificial world away from a real colour space, giving images the feeling that something was slightly off, a bit grimy, unnatural and unpleasant.

Then, when cutting to scenes that took place in the real world, filled with a dark reality, they kept the colour correction and tints neutral, with a subtly cooler, shadow laden look.

Grading software also has other tools beyond adding a colour tint. For example, a key decision during the post production process is deciding on the level of saturation and contrast - which determines how vivid or washed out the colour feels.

We mentioned the lighting of Ballad Of A Small Player, well part of what supports this is how the footage was treated during the grade. They pushed the contrast and saturation to the extreme. This led to highlights clipping, shadows getting crushed and skin tones that were at times overly saturated and right on the edge of breaking apart altogether.

If you bring down the saturation and contrast it loses some of its manic visual tone and tense emotion.  

When it comes to grading, a trick that cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto used when working with colourist Yvan Lucas in Baselight grading software is to create different LUTs, looks with different colour, contrast and saturation levels, that were based on actual photochemical filmic techniques. 

For example a Technicolor ENR-process look that is contrasty with particularly rich blacks but subdued colors, a look that replicates Kodak film negative printed on Kodak print stock - which has more saturated, natural tones, or a vintage Autochrome look which is less saturated with colours emulationing the early film stock. 

They then apply these different looks to different scenes depending on their emotional content and what is happening in the story.

Such as using the more saturated Kodak look for a magical, transcendental moment, then cutting back to reality on the same angle but with a more desaturated look. Or for a pivotal scene wrought with destruction, guilt, shock and confusion, applying the ENR look that is contrasty with heavy shadows but desaturated colors. 

Prieto used this same idea on Barbie, using a more saturated, three-strip Technicolor style LUT for more playful scenes in her larger than life, fantastical world, and using a desaturated look with less vibrant colour and skin tones for the more depressing, less spectacular real world which was stripped of magic and joy.

CONCLUSION

Colour isn’t just something we see, it’s something we feel. Whether it’s through the sets and costumes that shape the world in front of the camera, the lighting that determines how those colours come to life, or the final grade that unifies it all, filmmakers use colour as a quiet language of emotion. 

A shift from warm to cool light can turn comfort into isolation. A change in wardrobe can track a character’s internal decay. And a subtle tint in the grade can transport us into an entirely different dystopian world.

What’s remarkable is that these changes often work subconsciously, without us being aware that the filmmakers are subtly manipulating how we feel about the story. We don’t have to notice the hue of a wall, the colour of a costume or the tint of a light to feel their effect. 

Because when colour is used with intention, it doesn’t just decorate the frame it deepens our connection to the story. And that’s the real power of a film’s palette: to shape not just what we see, but how we experience the world on screen.