Bell Antoni, P. (2005) If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die. Burlington: Elsevier

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The book examines the way colour influences the audience and moves the plot forward. It analyses colours in relation to characters, story and scene development. This book was important to the project for its detailed examination, taking notes from each chapter helped in the creation of a cheat sheet for different colours and their most mainstream meaning.

 

At the beginning of the book, the author talks about the experiments she did with her students and how that helped changed her perception of how people view colour. She explains how they used to have classes on specific colours and students could bring whatever objects they associated with it on the given day. What she did not expect was that depending on the colour they were surrounded by, the students’ behaviour began to change as well – “The listlessness of Blue Day and the otherworldly atmosphere of Purple Day, described next, reinforced my belief that color influences our choices, our opinions, our emotional state.” (Bell Antoni 2005, p. 23). Her findings and the way she analyses various directors’ use of colour in their films is very thorough and, at the same time, extremely open to new interpretations. The author appears to suggest that colour is much more powerful than we might think and, although we can establish certain meanings and conventions, at the end of the day “it is color that can determine how we think and what we feel.” (Bell Antoni 2005, p. 27)