Color pallet

Start very general and become more refined. Before you begin any video project, select a few colors that you feel fit the tone of the piece. These colors will be the only colors you use throughout the video essay. Here are some examples to give you an idea of good color pallets and bad ones:

• Complementary Colors are colors that are opposite each other on a color wheel.
• Primary Colors are the three basic pigments, red, blue, and yellow, that can be mixed to make every other color
• Monochromatic Colors arecolors of the same hue, but with different levels of lightness and saturation.
• Poor Color Pallets are color pallets which do not acknowledge the relationship between colors. The dynamics between hue, lightness, and saturation are arbitrary.

When building your color pallet there are three things to consider: hue, lightness and saturation. You can think of hue as what determines the base of the color. Lightness is how bright or dark the hue is and saturation is the strength of the color (black and white is 0% saturation)

These examples use color pallets that contain six colors, but you can theoretically get away with as little as two. Typically, six is a good number, any more and your video can begin to lose consistancy. It all depends on how you want to use color in your piece. When choosing your colors think about the use cases (Which will be the font color? What will the background be? Do I need two background colors? Two font colors?)

A helpful tool is Adobe's color website Adobe Color. It allows you to build color pallets using the same theories we just discussed as well as more complex ones. These colors can be saved and imported as 'swatches' into programs like After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator.