[Week V] Colour & Narrative, Third Entry - Demon's Souls

"Let Strength be Grant, so that the World Might be Mended. So the World Might be Mended."

Demon's Souls ~ 2009

Popular for it's unforgiving game design, Demon's Souls captivated the feeling of isolation and fear of continuing almost too perfectly. The game was set in a dark medieval fantasy world, in a kingdom called Boletaria. The whole kingdom had been engulfed in a colourless fog that had awoken terrible demons who had either killed or taken prisoner of every living person. Those that they slayed's souls were consumed by the demons to empower their whole evil being.

As a singular character, alone from direct help, had to travel into the colourless fog to slay the demons, and banish them from the kingdom. The game was intentionally very dark. The only bright colours came from the horrific demons, as signals of danger.

The levels of Demon's Souls were structure into sections. Before passing into a new section, the player had to push through the colourless fog. Due to the game's unforgiving nature, pushing forward was not always desires, and many players would trek back to the nearest safe point to deposit their earnings first, because if continued on they would risk losing everything.

The colourless fog was a way of the game telling the player that he hadn't been a certain direction yet, warning them that they had no knowledge of what was ahead. The world past the colourless fog was desaturated, adding to the feeling of being uninvited. The lack of colour reminds the player of death, as upon dying, the world first loses its colour.

But colour was also a warning. Seeing the red dots from far away meant that something very strong was watching the player. Everything was a threat, except one thing.

The way to communicate with other players was through leaving short messages on the round that helped warn and prepare them for their future battles. Then there were the summon signs, which glowed a light blue, a spirit call of help from dead player. The brightness and choice of colour signalling hope, a plea for something easier.

Demon's Souls nailed the feeling of isolation and fear of progress through all of its core aspects, and in my opinion is the best example of colour enhancing narrative in computer games.

[Week V] Colour & Narrative, Second Entry - Mickey's Wild Adventure

 

This computer game takes Disney's Mickey Mouse through a time-travelling adventure through side-scrolling levels based on favourite moments between 1928 and 1990. This game takes advantage of this narrative for its art-design very early as, as the first level takes place before the invention of a coloured Mickey Mouse, it is black and white.

Mickey's Wild Adventure

Slowly the colour starts the fill the level, but so subtle that the player doesn't notice at first. The reason for this is simple. Since the first level is based on an cartoon before the invention of colour, the art-design needed to pay homage to this fact. If they took a recognisable place from the 1920s and added colour, the new detail would stop it from being nostalgic. As colour fills up, the locations that Mickey Mouse are at a later time, after the invention of colour.

At first players may be unattracted to the black and white, considering that the game was release in the 1990s, but it is a perfect way to really get the feeling of time-travelling across to the player. When they release colour is now part of the background, they will appreciate the new technology, as would the Mickey Mouse fans who saw it happen.

[Week V] Colour & Narrative, First Entry - The Last King of Scotland

The Last King of Scotland is about a young doctor from Scotland travelling to Uganda to eventually become the dictator Idi Amin's personal physician. When travelling from Scotland to Uganda the colour temperature of the movie drastically changes.

The Last King of Scotland (2006)

The movie begins with a cool colour temperature, which isn't very noticeable at first, until when he arrives in South Africa the colours are all very different. This contrast really helps make the viewer feel like he as entered a new place. However, the movie doesn't always continue with the warmth of South African culture.

Here we are familiarised with the cool temperature from the first part of the film. In this part of the movie, the cold colours represent death and loss. The movie does this colour temperature switching a few times during different scenes, and is a very big part of it.

[Week IV] Colour Proportion, Third Entry - Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge

This video game takes colour and uses it for game design. The red in the image above is defined as "runner vision", what the experienced parkour specialist sees as opportunities for getting around the buildings faster. This concept bleeds nicely into the visual design of the game, which is a clean and mostly white yet shadowed cityscape with only a few hints of colour. Mirror's Edge does a great job at making one colour stand out and seem important, whilst only being a small part of the overall composition. The differences between the light and dark places of the buildings not only represents the shadows, but the direction we should take as players.

[Week IV] Colour Proportion, Second Entry - Jet Set Radio

Jet Set Radio

Rather different from usual video game art, this game uses a visual style to replicate Graffiti in a futuristic Japan. The use of colour, or rather, the use or no colour, is very creative in the above image. The main character has been deliberately left absent of colour, but is surrounded by mostly a mix of green, yellow, red, and blue. However, the green is the most prominent. The way the colours are used, despite the lack of obvious shading, still show depth. Everything seems to be falling down with him. The logo however doesn't stand out as much as it should, as it blends in too well with the background.

[Week IV] Colour Proportion, First Entry - The Extractor

Poster for The Extractor

This image of The Extractor has a nice composition of blue and orange. The colours softly mask the details of the buildings, and this makes the character more pronounce and important. The way the orange blends in with his hair whilst giving the sense of the sun rising is awe-inspiring. The cold blue on the left brings focus to the cold look in his left eye. The contrasting moods of both colours blended in so brilliantly tells a lot about the character's personality. On a side note the striking white bloom helps disconnect the blending between the complementary colours.

[Week III] Saturation, Third Entry - Saturation in Video Games

Doom 3

Video games use art-direction to create atmosphere, so it's a no-brainer that there some games out there that use low-saturated colours. The image above is of a horror game, and since colourfulness is linked to joy, this computer game uses little saturation. We can look at these computer games as a proof for the importance of using the correct saturation.

Luigi from Super Mario Galaxy (left) and Luigi's Mansion (right)

The image on the left is Luigi from a very popular video game for all ages, who's never seen without his bright colourful outfit. On the right, we have the same character in a different game, which genre is now completely changed. To help represent the narrative of the game on the right, less saturated colours are used. This is put emphasis on the fact that horror is now part of the visual design.

[Week III] Saturation, Second Entry - Oversaturation

Girl (Edited Saturation)

Oversaturation takes a usual imagine and over-brightens the colours. This interesting look isn't used very often in media however. The picture of the girl above, if you look closely, certain details have been over-brightened so much that the colour would be considered wrong. This girl should have brown hair, but there's a blue splodge. But how did it get there? Oversaturation simply brings out the more prominent colours and makes them dominant, with this we get to see the natural colours enhanced, but unlike hue changes, they're still mostly the correct colours.

Corpse Bride (Edited Saturation)

In this image of Corpse Bride, which originally has low saturation, it has been edited to reveal what natural colours the character is wearing. Corpse Bride isn't intended to be colourful, but it's interesting to be able to reveal what was hidden from the creators.

Using this technique we couldn't find the hair colour of Citizen Kane, but we can take old destroyed imagines that have lost most of their colour, and turn the saturation up.

[Week III] Saturation, First Entry - What is Saturation?

Saturation can be simplified as being colourfulness. A purely saturated red would be a very bright red, solid in its own colour. Without much saturation, it would be closer to monochrome (or black and white).

Bomb

Without saturation, we can't determine hue, and without hue, we can't see colour. How could you disarm this bomb even if I told you the green wire needed to be cut? It would be improbable, and you'd have to guess which one to cut.

Fish (Edited Saturation)

In a less extreme example, we see that lowered saturation makes colour look more dull. It does not destroy the colour however. We can still consider this fish to be gold even after heavily editing the saturation. It would be wrong to say the fish on the right is darker, but you can say it has less colour.

[Week II] Value, Third Entry - Value in Fashion

Japanese Girl in Kimono

Whether traditional or modern, we can see the uses of colour vary drastically within fashion. If we begin to imagine a dress with bright colours we imagine the girl wearing it to be happy. Similarly, if we consider a dress that uses dress colours, we may envision the girl to be bad or somewhat twisted in nature. In fashion, we sometimes choose the brightness of our colours to match out moods alongside the hue.

Sometimes value is simply irrelevant when it comes to fashion, but the above example is what happens when we don't consider it to reflect completely on our moods. Gothic in this video doesn't refer to wearing dark colours, but in terms of design. In which case, when is the brightness of our fashion important?

Going back to what we learnt before, when a colour has a very low value, it becomes almost black. In which case, if we consider black in fashion, it's obvious how we use it to reflect our moods. But similarly, a colour with very much value becomes almost white. To make contrast we use light and dark colours together. It looks sharp. Light colour makes the impression very soft and feminine, and dark colour makes it smart, masculine, chic, and sometimes avant-garde.

[Week II] Value, Second Entry - Value in Television

Tom & Jerry

Most of us grew up watching cartoons as children, and some of us was define them as colourful educational fun. But wait a second, if you grew up with a colour television, wouldn't anything you watch be colourful? What makes Tom & Jerry more colourful than say, the World News?

Tom & Jerry, lowered Value

By simply lowering the value of the colours, not saturation, we consider this new image to be less colourful. Except from the fact that lowering the value makes the details harder to see, but cartoons deliberately had very bright colours to make them feel more friendly and inviting to children.

Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction (Edited Value)

The mood of the image above doesn't change, as the contents within the picture tells too much of a story for the value to make real difference. Either way our televisions may simply have different settings for brightness and contrast anyway, so it's important for value to not make a significant difference.

Unknown Painting (Edited Value)

In this comparison however, we see that value makes a huge difference to how we feel about the colours. The above image shows an almost divine expression of a girl welcoming the light, whereas the bottom image shows what looks like a Gothic cry for help.

Because of this difference, while Cartoons prefer the use of brighter colours, television refrains from using images that are so easily warped by value. If a scene could have a different meaning just between the viewer has different brightness and contrast settings, then that would be an issue.

[Week II] Value, First Entry - What is Value?

Value, which is also known as lightness, is a property of colour which how we define how bright a colour is. When painting, we change the value of our colours by mixing them with white or black paints.

Munsell Colour Model

Here we can see the value increase from 0 to 9. Obviously in real life, there are more than 8 different brightnesses for colours, but this diagram shows us how colours with the same hue can look very different by changing value.

Colourized Apple Shading

Without appreciating the use of value, we would not be able to capture depth via the use of shading. The importance of value as a colour property is obvious, and it allows to take a colour such as red and give it different moods, all whilst keeping it definitely red.

[Week I] Hue, Third Entry - The Science of Hue

How do we Perceive Hue?

What exactly changes within our brains that makes one colour have a different hue from another? In our eyes we have many specialised cells that help us see, but it's the Ganglion cells that help us differentiate the hue of one colour from another.

Ganglion Cells

You don't need to fully understand every aspect of these cells, but you should notice that there are in fact two different types of Ganglion cells. Red-green ones and Blue-yellow ones. Another thing to notice that in the image above, we have a large Red-green cell being shown on the left. This cell would determine how much red or green is in the light we see by comparing the response from the red area or green area. More response from the red area, the more red there is in the light we see.

How do We Change Hue?

Why do the cells respond different to lights anyway? Colour, and thus hue, comes from the spectrum of light. By varying the wavelengths of light, we can force our eyes to see things differently. In computer graphics we must know how to replicate specific colours, and we can do this by having a defined colour model.

HSV Colour Space

By using an abstract mathematical model, we can refer back to colours in a computer by using specific numbers. We can tell a computer these numbers, and have it reproduce a colour by sending a signal to our monitors of what wavelengths the light should have.

How does Nature Change Hue?

We can control the wavelengths of light through technology, but then how does a chameleon change the hue of its colour? The chameleons have their own specialised cells called Chromatophores. 

Similar to the Ganglion cells, there are two types of Chromatophores. A Red-yellow one, and a Blue-white one. They affect what colour the chameleons skin is by growing or shrinking.

Whether it's through a chemical change, or a computer receiving data, we see colour due to the mechanics of our eyes. Nature deems hue differences to be very important, but outside of camouflage, what are the other practice uses?

We could explore the affects of different hue for the rest of our lives, or we could simply appreciate the beauty it gives the world.

[Week I] Hue, Second Entry - Hue Changes

iPod nano Colour Range

In everyday life we make decisions on what we want based on colour. The Apple iPod nano comes in a range of different colours, and when given the choice of which to take, not everyone would choose the same. Disregarding the black and silver variations, the rest are actually hue changes of each other.

We are not deciding between what saturation or brightness we want, but we're deciding on the Hue differences. This is because hue is really the most important property of colour when it comes to preferences. Which iPod nano is your favourite? If we say to others, that our favourite colour is blue, we'd care less whether it was light-blue or vivid-blue, they both have the same hue. Our preference is the hue.

 

Cars of a Hue Spectrum

When we have something with a singular colour, we are able to shift the Hue without worries of the object or image as a whole looking abstract or strange. We wouldn't change the hue of an entire image of a beach, if the purpose was only to change the colour of a beach ball. If we did the colours of the sand, water, and sky would be abstract. But outside of creating identical products, when do simply change hue? Or better yet, does nature ever make the switch? For what reason would nature want to do so?

Chameleon, Kenya

You may feel at awe when looking at this fantastic creature, and it's strange patterns on its body. It is in fact a chameleon, popular for being able to change their appearances for the sake of camouflage. It's a bit different from media-minded people making different hue choices available for our sake of preference, this use of hue changing isn't superficial.

Indulge yourself in the beauty of nature.

[Week I] Hue, First Entry - What is Hue?

Hue is simply defined as [a colour or shade] in the Oxford Dictionary, but when we are dealing with the relationship between colours, we use the word Hue with a different meaning. Hue is instead, a property of colour. On its own it does not describe to us a colour's brightness, saturation, or chroma etc.

"A lotus flower at Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue, central Vietnam"

In the image above, the left shows the original Hue for all of the colours. We could simply describe this image with saying: "a purple flower with green grass". To the right, we have the exact same image, with all other properties of colour the same except with a difference of Hue. We could describe this as: "an orange flower with blue grass." 


If we were to change Hue for the whole image, rotating that property equally, every colour changes. But they do not become the same colour. The change from purple to orange, and green to blue, are one in the same when we're dealing with Hue changes on a computer.

Hue Spectrum

If you were to place your finger on the colour green, then move it to the colour blue, the arbitrary value you would have travelled would be 120. Now if you image that, if you move your finger to the right end it would loop back to the left end, what would be the distance between purple and orange?

The simple definition you find in a dictionary doesn't help us truly understand the meaning of Hue, or at least differentiate it from other properties of colour. Hue may appear to you to simply be colour, but if it were the only property, we couldn't explore colours to the point of being able to recreate our vision into a captivating painting.