Saturation

This is a screen shot from the game 'Journey' for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Its an experimental indie game in which the art style was intended to look like moving concept art. The result is something very refreshing. You play as a red hooded figure simply exploring a desert. On the way you come across glowing, ancient, blue ruins, carpets that drift through the sky, and eventually you gain the ability to fly. Each new area has a colour palette that sits very well with me. From this in game screen shot, it is evident that the game demonstrates a cpnfident art style and a very emersive atmosphere. This is thanks to the colour palette in which the red characters are complimented via the less saturated green sky. There are also some broken less saturated shades evident in the sandy hills, and particularly in the scarf squid floating in the air. The use of the deep saturated red for the characters, really makes a dynamic change from the less saturated background and creates a striking contrast. Also The horizon fades almost completely to white, and this creates a brilliant sense of infinity; this desert never ends.

Summer Wars is a 2009 animé movie exploring how a digital life can come to affect everybody's reality. The movie focuses on swapping between a digital world called 'Oz', and the real world the characters occupy. To ensure the audience will always be able to define the two instances, a more garish and computer generated set of colours is used when viewing 'Oz'. Straight off you can see the hues are very unnatural, with screen being arranged in a rainbow fashion around the central pillar. The colours are very saturated and lend to the digitized feel. I am quite a fan of the 'colour or nothing' approach to the design of this digital world. There are very few subtle colours here. Colour seems to exist in a pure form, or not at all. The monitors, interfaces, and eyes of the figure all glow with a candy-coloured light, which makes a very unnatural contrast with the completely white background, enforcing in the viewers mind that this is not reality, and so the distinction between the game world and reality is made.

I was impressed here not only by the tasteful colour palette and general composition, but also how colour (or the lack of) has been used to actually give an indication of where the characters are. Present is this usual blorange combo, with the Karl, Russel, and their companions coming out of a cold blue forest into a warm orange sunset, however it's the less saturated cliff face that puts things into perspective. The fact that the colours are desaturated near the bottom of the cliff give a great indication that the characters are up somewhere very high, to the extent that they are above the mornign fog, or perhaps the clouds themselves. This scene is thick with atmosphere, and I would hope to go about my own work with such colour confidence.