In this work, we discuss and present different techniques for film colour summarization together with a preliminary colorimetric study. The aim of this project is to combine the frames of different videos, reducing them to just one image of chromatic significance.
This elaboration is made through two different methods: the movie barcodes and long exposure images. Due to their nature, those concise images have not only an artistical aim, but are movies chromatic synthesis that can eventually be used for colour checks and for identification of dominances.
At first, we applied those methods on two videos from the Pixar Animation Studios\u2019 short animation movies. Then, as preliminary test, we present an application on the frames of a homemade video altered in different ways together with the relative visual and numerical results

A. Plutino

A. Rizzi

I. Otto

M.P. Lanaro

AIR Universita degli studi di Milano

 AIC Interim Meeting   |   25 – 29 September 2018   |   Lisbon, Portugal  |  www.aic2018.org 
All the Colours of a Film: a study on the Chromatic 
Variation of Movies  
Isabella Ottoa, Alice Plutino*a, Matteo Lanaroa, Alessandro Rizzia 
 
a MIPS Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, Milan, Italy. 
* Corresponding author: alice.plutino@unimi.it   
 
ABSTRACT 
In this work, we discuss and present different techniques for film colour summarization 
together with a preliminary colorimetric study. The aim of this project is to combine the 
frames of different videos, reducing them to just one image of chromatic significance.  
This elaboration is made through two different methods: the movie barcodes and long 
exposure images. Due to their nature, those concise images have not only an artistical 
aim, but are movies chromatic synthesis that can eventually be used for colour checks and 
for identification of dominances.  
At first, we applied those methods on two videos from the Pixar Animation Studios’ short 
animation movies. Then, as preliminary test, we present an application on the frames of 
a homemade video altered in different ways together with the relative visual and 
numerical results. 
 
Keywords: Colour movies, Colour histogram, Video Analysis, Image Analysis, Image 
Processing  
 
INTRODUCTION 
Since its origin, cinema has tried to use colours to give movies a powerful and meaningful 
relevance [4,6]. In this work, we propose two different representations of entire movies 
in a single image.  
At first, we show these methods applied to two videos from the Pixar Animation Studios’ 
short animation movies, then we apply the same method on a short homemade video 
which colour has been altered in three different ways.  
In the first method, the movie barcodes allow to follow the main chromatic content along 
the whole film, and the long exposure images permit to create an impressionistic image 
as a kind of average colour spatial histogram.  
A possible use of these methods, is to help in having a visual global idea of potential colour 
dominants.  
 
Title of the article, Calibri 10pt, italic 
AIC Interim Meeting   |   25 – 29 September 2018   |   Lisbon, Portugal  |  www.aic2018.org  
STATE OF THE ART 
Colour palettes and colour barcodes aren’t a new idea: they can easily be found in 
literature and some of them can be downloaded from the web. Many of these generators, 
though, tend to just randomly pick colours or to reduce the whole frame into a one-pixel 
column averaging the pixels colours. 
Two of the many websites that shares movie barcodes are: a Tumblr blog called 
Moviebarcode [7] and The Colors of Motion developed and created by Charlie Clark [2]. In 
Clark’s work the movie is reduced in one image computing the average colour of an image 
and creating a line of pixels of this colour.  
Different works were made by Martin Bellander [1] and Jason Salavon [5]. The first did 
something similar to a movie barcode but developing a code to analyse the use of colours 
in paintings over history, while Jason Salavon used a software of his own design to 
generate different types of images. Like Bellander, Salavon analysed paintings and created 
some sort of barcodes of MTv’s music videos, but the most interesting work for us is his 
third project called Amalgamation work, in which he presents a synthesis and unification 
of pictures or movie frames. Salavon’s Amalgamations remind of the photographer Jason 
Shulman’s works, Photographs of Films in which photographs the entire movie using ultra-
long exposures, obtaining a single image that captures the entire length of a film. 
In 2013, Theodore Gray, the Co-founder of Wolfram Research [9], spent almost a year to 
develop an iPad app in partnership with Walt Disney Animated Studio. He and his team 
used the Mathematica software to create a feature they called Colour Maps, to extract 
the colour script out of a final animated movie. Theodore Gray’s work was the one that 
inspired us to try and develop our own code to create different and representative images 
of movies, to produce a fast-visual colour analysis.  
 
The selected short films 
The movies from Pixar Animation Studios’ are two: “La Luna” and “Presto”. “La Luna” 
(2011) is directed and written by Enrico Casarosa. The short premiered on 6th June 2011 
at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, and it was paired with Pixar's 
Brave for its theatrical release on 22th June 2012, being shown before the film's beginning. 
The analysed frames are: 9840. The second selected short movie is “Presto” (2008), 
directed and written by Dough Sweetland. The short was release the 10th June 2008 at 
Annecy Animation Film Festival and it was paired with WALL-E the 27th June 2008. The 
analysed frames are: 7486. 
For the second type of analysis we shoot a short video of Matera landscape and then we 
altered it in different ways. The video has been modified through the software DaVinci 
Resolve decreasing the values of one of the three channels. In this way we obtained three 
videos, one with just R and G channels, one with just G and B channels and one with just 
R and B channels. The analysed frames are 700 for each version.  
 
Title of the article, Calibri 10pt, italic 
AIC Interim Meeting   |   25 – 29 September 2018   |   Lisbon, Portugal  |  www.aic2018.org  
MOVIE BARCODES 
 
 
Here the steps for Movies Barcodes. The algorithm considers every single frame, divided 
in a R, G and B channels; the first step is the posterization of the image. In this part the 
algorithm computes the number of colours present in the image and then, this value is 
divided by a defined arbitrary number. For this experiment we selected a value of 100. So, 
for each RGB channel the values of colours (starting from 255) are divided by 100 and 
rounded to the lower value. This colour reduction permit to obtain a posterization of the 
image as is visible in FIG. 1. Then we rank the most used colour bins. Those operations are 
done for each frame and to plot the final images the algorithm built an image composed 
by a line of pixels of height 100 for each frame, in which the most frequent colour bins are 
Figure 1 Workflow of the "Movie Barcode" algorithm. 
Figure 2 Movie Barcode palettes of "La Luna" (top) and "Presto" (bottom). 
Title of the article, Calibri 10pt, italic 
AIC Interim Meeting   |   25 – 29 September 2018   |   Lisbon, Portugal  |  www.aic2018.org  
reported in percentage.  
With this method we obtained the images in FIG. 2 that show the 5 most present colour 
bins in each frame for both the analysed movies.  
 
MOVIE LONG EXPOSURE IMAGES  
For the realization of long exposure images, we created a simple code that sum and 
average all the frames of the movies.  
The results of our movies long exposure images are visible in FIG.3.   
 
 
 
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 
FIG. 2 and 3 shown the two methods applied to the short movies “La Luna” and “Presto” 
and those syntheses provide information about the mood of the film and about the 
sequence of the different scenes. The first movie has a strong dominant of blue and light 
blue colours, that suggest calm and relax, despite the second that has a strong red 
dominance, that suggest action and movement.  
 
Figure 3 Long exposure images of "La Luna" (left) and "Presto" (right). 
Figure 4 Same Frame of the modified video of Matera. The first is the original one, then we have the result of the reduction 
of each RGB channel. 
Title of the article, Calibri 10pt, italic 
AIC Interim Meeting   |   25 – 29 September 2018   |   Lisbon, Portugal  |  www.aic2018.org  
 
 
Then, we applied the Movie Barcode method to a homemade video of the city of Matera 
and to 3 versions modified compressing each time a different RGB channel. A frame of the 
different videos is reported in FIG. 4. 
In FIG. 5 we have a representation of the movie barcodes of the original video and of the 
altered ones. Here the different colour casts are visible. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Figure 5 Movie Barcode Palettes of the original video of Matera (top, left) and the same video modified reducing one RGB 
channel. 
Table 1 The first chart indicates the RGB mean values of the movie Barcodes of the Matera’s video. The second chart 
shows the value of RGB difference from the original video.  
R G B ΔR ΔG ΔB
Original 170 171 170
RG 163 165 147 -7 -6 -23
RB 188 167 187 18 -4 17
GB 149 182 177 -21 11 7
Mean Difference from Original 
Title of the article, Calibri 10pt, italic 
AIC Interim Meeting   |   25 – 29 September 2018   |   Lisbon, Portugal  |  www.aic2018.org  
CONCLUSIONS 
In this work we have presented two methods for the summarization of movie colours: 
Movie Barcodes and Long Exposure Images. With those methods is possible to visualize in 
a compress and alternative way the colours present in a movie. 
We have presented these methods applied to short Pixar movies and Movie Barcodes to 
a homemade movie with altered colour, in order to test its capabilities of colour cast 
visualization. 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
We would like to thank Jacopo Orsilli for his help and support in the coding. 
 
REFERENCES 
[1] Bellander, M., The colors of paintings [online] Available at: 
http://blog.martinbellander.com/   
[2] Clark, C., (2015), The Colors of Motion [online] Available at: 
https://www.thecolorsofmotion.com/about 
[3] Cornwell- Clyne, A., (1936), Colour Cinematography, Springer US 
[4] Lackey, R., (2015), 5 Common Film Color Schemes – Learning Cinematic Color 
Design, Cinema 5D, [online]pages Available at: https://www.cinema5d.com/film-
color-schemes-cinematic-color-design/ 
[5] Salavon, J., JaconSalavon, [online] Avaukable at: http://www.salavon.com/  
[6] Studio Binder, StudioBinder Blog, [online] Available at: 
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/how-to-use-color-in-film-50-examples-of-
movie-color-palettes - importance of color in films 
[7] Tumblr, Moviebarcode, [online] Available at: http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/  
[8] Wheeler, L. J., (1969), Principles of Cinematography, Fountain Press Limited, 
London 
[9] Wolfram Research, Wolfram Blog, [online] Available at:  
http://blog.wolfram.com/ 
 


All the colours of a film: study of the chromatic variation of movies

https://air.unimi.it/retrieve/handle/2434/595019/1083927/Full_Paper_All%20the%20colours%20of%20a%20film.pdf

All the colours of a film: study of the chromatic variation of movies

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