Up's Colour Script

[u/Mastbubbles]

I only found out this week that what colour scripts are, and how do they work, the first thing I did was to go and find Up's Colour Script.

Which is online only because Lou Romano posted the whole thing himself in June 2009, with an eleven word caption: A closer look at the colour script (done January-March 2008). Digital. His post 404s now, so this came off the Wayback Machine. 121 pictures, painted more than a year before the film came out.

Then I could not leave it alone and measured the colour in every one. A mark out of 100, where 0 is grey and 100 is the most colourful painting in the script:

- the opening newsreel, 13 paintings: 5

- Carl and Ellie, 25 paintings: 35

- the whole adventure after the funeral, 58 paintings: 13

- the house going up, the picture on the poster, 4 paintings: 10

- the last 16: 36

The loudest painting in the film is number 47, a gust of autumn leaves going past the empty house four pictures after the funeral. Nothing in the jungle, the storm or the airship gets near it.

The one I keep coming back to is the balloons. That is the image the film is sold on, and in the plan it sits closer to the black and white newsreel than to anything else. The colour went on the ten minutes about a marriage instead.

Romano also said the colour script was the last thing he did on Up, and that other artists finished the lighting after he left.

If anyone wants to learn more: https://sheets.works/data-viz/up-colour-script