October 8, 2017
3 Ways David Fincher Uses Color to Completely Mess with Your Head
The color palettes David Fincher uses in his films are just as powerful as his dark, unstable characters.
There are a lot of words to describe David Fincher’s films but “subtle” isn’t really one of them. The worlds he creates have a characteristic normalcy, albeit dark and slightly off, but as their stories progress we’re always brought to the nightmarish carnival that is Fincher’s creativity—peeking past the curtain to see a fight club, a missing woman stabbing a man to death mid-coitus, and a mummified man barely alive laying in a room full of pine tree air fresheners.
However, there are areas in which Fincher uses some restraint and finesse in order to carefully lay the groundwork for his more over-the-top sequences, one of which is color. In this video essay by StudioBinder, we get to see how the director employs different color palettes to communicate important themes and character traits to his audience, as well as to ramp up the anticipation in suspenseful scenes.
Source: NoFilmSchool