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UNCONVENTIONAL That’s Why They Call It the Blues D
esigner Patti Bellantoni was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City when
she devised an experiment to help her students think more deeply about color. She asked students to come to class with items associated with red, and they showed up with things like paint chips, fabric swatches, colored lights, hot peppers, and cinnamon candy. During what Bellantoni came to call the “Red Hour,” students talked louder, cranked up the volume on music, and became so agitated that Bellantoni had to break up a fight between two friends. When she followed up with “Blue Hour” ses- sions — think big pale pillows and mints
— students became so laid-back that they bordered on listlessness.
The experiment,
which the designer expanded using addi- tional colors, became part of Bellantoni’s curriculum and the seed of her 2005 book, If It’s
Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die. We don’t imbue color with emotion, Bellantoni writes — it’s the other way around: “Color determines how we think and feel.” In the book, she provides a detailed analysis on how color is used in dozens of films to communicate emotion and as a storytell- ing device. Her book gives insight into the effects of a wide-ranging palette: Tur- quoise tends to inspire conversation, for example, while yellow can either put you on alert or lull you into nostalgia.
Bellantoni doesn’t provide a color-
by-numbers formula, but instead warns against over-generalizing about the effects of one color or another. “Even the slightest variation of a single color can have a profound influence on our behavior,” she writes. “In wise hands, color can become a powerful tool for filmmakers to subliminally layer a story” with meaning. A powerful tool for meeting planners, too.
. —Barbara Palmer ON THE WEB
Andrea Sullivan of BrainStrength Systems talked about the neurological impact of color in “Audio/Visual/Neurological,” a CMP Series article in the March issue of Convene, at convn.org/audio-visual.
AUGUST 2013 PCMA CONVENE
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