- What do I think color is?

(laughing)

What is color?

(gentle cheerful music)

- (laughing) I can't answer that question.

- (laughing) What is color?

Color is a sensation.

(chiming)

- Color is a very personal thing.

Color is very subjective.

It can trigger like a visceral response.

Like if you smell bacon,

ah, bacon.

You know, it's like if you see certain kinds of colors,

the same exact feeling.

- I don't know. Ask some smart person here.

For exam-- (laughing)

- Color is a term that we use

to describe a collection of attributes,

hue and saturation and value,

that describes how we see things.

Hue is what the actual color is in the rainbow spectrum.

Is it more yellow,

or is it more orange?

Bluer or redder?

Value is how bright something is relative to something else.

Is it white?

Is it black?

Is it some sort of middle grey?

Saturation is how intense the color is?

Is it more subdued and grey,

or is it more vibrant, almost fluorescence, you know?

A fully saturated color is quite eye popping.

(electricity crackling)

Color is everything to artists.

- It wasn't until I started working at Pixar

that I think I had to think about color in a different way,

to apply it to a narrative

and it can mean something.

- On Up, there was a scene where Carl's house

got burned by Muntz.

It's really one of the lowest points of the film,

and it's this sunrise.

Normally sunrises are very beautiful.

It's the start of a new day,

but for this one, we wanted an angry sunrise.

It was just this beautiful tone of red

that was so dramatic for me.

I think that was really cool.

- Because the choice of color is so critical to the story telling process,

it's really important that we understand

the science of the choosing of those colors.

The first thing to realize about color

is that color is really made up of light.

Light comprises different wavelengths of energy,

and when that energy comes through our pupil

onto our retina inside our eye,

it becomes nerve impulses, signals,

and eventually gets processed by the brain.

So the light is out in the real world.

The color only really exists inside your brain when you perceive it.

(fireworks popping)

In the rest of this lesson,

we're gonna dive more into

the science and perception of color.

Let's go.