Mastering The Film Color Palette: The Guillermo Del Toro Way

Guillermo del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, on October 9, 1964. His father was a salesman and his mother was a costume designer. He has described his childhood as a happy one and has said that he had an idyllic upbringing.

When he was about 8 years old, del Toro’s father would take him to horror movies as a special treat. He would also take him to the occasional science fiction film or supernatural thriller.
 

Who Is Guillermo Del Toro?

Del Toro later stated that the first time he saw Frankenstein (1931), it left such an impression on him that he wanted to create horror films himself.

When del Toro was about 10 years old, his parents divorced and he stayed with his father while his mother moved to Los Angeles, California to pursue her career in Hollywood.

Del Toro continued to express an interest in filmmaking while still at school, participating in various amateur projects with other young people who were interested in film-making.

As part of the school’s “no grade system”, he says they were able to spend time learning how all aspects of film production worked, including carrying props and working with actors. He then enrolled at the Guadalajara School of Film and studied directing and producing there. 

Film Color Palette of Guillermo Del Toro

I’ve been a big fan of Guillermo del Toro’s movies for some time now. While many directors choose to film in neutral tones, del Toro has a specific color palette that he sticks to.

I’m very interested in the creative choices that he makes, so I decided to explore that palette in this post. I love how the colors in his films are so vivid. There are so many beautiful shots.

The best part is that these colors aren’t random—they follow patterns and themes throughout all of his movies. [Spoiler alert] In fact, the color red shows up more than once (movies include: Pacific Rim, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth).

After combing through all of his work, I’ve found a set of core colors that are used throughout all of his movies: blue, green, orange/red, purple and white/silver. These core colors appear frequently in almost every movie he’s made. Every time you watch one of his films you’ll notice how these same colors keep popping up.

Mastering The Film Color Palette of Guillermo Del Toro

Color is the most important tool of a cinematographer. It is his means of expression and his voice.

   

More than any other visual element, color can be used to create mood, to evoke an emotional response from an audience, and to manipulate what the audience sees on screen. 

A film’s color palette can enhance or distract from its story, but it’s also inherently tied into the director’s vision.

A filmmaker’s choices when it comes to color are deeply personal and often take center stage in their films, reflecting their influences and even dictating how we see them as artists. 

Guillermo Del Toro is no exception. His need to be surrounded by color, his passion for artifice, his personal obsessions – they’re all visible in the films he creates.

In fact, Del Toro’s love of color has become so well-known that most people know his name thanks to a certain movie about a little girl who loved red dresses. But just because Del Toro’s style is so recognizable doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from it or aren’t allowed to borrow from his processes for your own work.

What Is Guillermo Del Toro Known For?

Guillermo Del Toro is a Mexican film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Guadalajara in 1964, Del Toro began his career as a special effects makeup artist for film and television in Mexico.

He first rose to prominence as the director of the 1997 sci-fi horror film The Devil’s Backbone. Del Toro first came to international attention with the success of his 2001 film Blade II. 

In 2006, he directed Pan’s Labyrinth, which was selected to be screened out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

The following year, he directed El Laberinto del Fauno (also known as Pan’s Labyrinth), a Spanish-language fantasy film from his native Mexico. 

In 2008, he directed the vampire fantasy action film Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

He has been acclaimed for the visual style and quality of his films, as well as their stories. Del Toro has been awarded the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award and Critic’s Choice Movie Award for Best Director. 

He is currently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work on The Shape of Water.

Del Toro has also received recognition for his work in comics.

Is Guillermo Del Toro An Auteur

Is Guillermo Del Toro an auteur? Well, he has credits on many of his movies as both writer and director. 

He also gets to work with the same people over and over again, so in that sense he’s very much in control of the movies he’s involved with.

It’s hard not to believe that when watching one of his films, especially since they all seem to be so different from what we normally see in theaters today. 

Thing is, there’s one man who pretty much defines “auteur” for me.

His name is Wes Anderson and I’d say he’s the Guillermo Del Toro of my time. Both have a very distinct style in their movies (and TV shows), even though they have different styles of humor, are working with different genres and use different approaches to storytelling.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Del Toro is friends with Anderson (who was an executive producer on this film) and has been inspired by him often enough to even name his production company “Apostle”. 

If you want to get a better idea of what I’m talking about, watch a couple of Wes Anderson’s films (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) 

Guillermo Del Toro Auteur Theory

When Guillermo Del Toro was a young boy, he discovered the joy of horror. He would create his own monsters at home, making them out of clay and papier mache. And then he would destroy them, over and over again.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Del Toro said that this was his way of expressing himself. “I have been making monsters all my life,” he explained. “I used to take pictures of myself with my toys and make little monster movies.”

Interestingly enough, the director’s first feature film was called The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story set during the Spanish Civil War. Clearly, monsters have always been close to Del Toro’s heart, but filmmaking came much later.

He studied for a career in special effects, but then changed direction when he realized that he could make his own movies instead. “In Mexico there was no tradition of making fantasy films,” Del Toro explained in an interview with Film Comment magazine.

“I thought it would be very easy to get into horror because I had access to all the resources of the Mexican movie industry.” Del Toro began writing screenplays while studying film at university. His first script was called Cronos, a vampire story set in Mexico City.

Guillermo Del Toro Vivid Associative Colors

In a recent interview, Guillermo del Toro said his colors are highly visual and visceral. This is why they work so well in both his films and his marketing campaigns. They create a very specific mood and emotion.

The colors he uses throughout his career are highly vivid, associative, and visceral. He uses those colors to create a very specific mood for each of his movies. He explains that he is not using the color for its purpose, but for the feeling it gives him.

The colors help establish atmosphere or emotion that is important to convey to the audience. He is looking for “the power of color” as he calls it, the emotional response color can provoke in us.

He remembers watching the movie The Wizard of Oz when he was five years old; one scene in particular stood out to him: “The fact that Dorothy opens the door and you see this almost monochromatic landscape and then you see her in her red dress and she pops like a flame of fire on the screen made me realize that color has these powers.”

By choosing such intense colors, Del Toro is trying to provoke an emotional response among viewers (read more on Color Theory).

Guillermo Del Toro Balanced Complementary Colors

Many films which use color palettes to establish moods or themes (think Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, for example) use what is known as complementary colors. 

This simply means that a scene will use colors to emphasize the difference between the two opposing sides of the story.

In The Godfather, yellow and red are used to represent the Corleone family while green is used to represent their rivals, while in Apocalypse Now, blue is used to represent the American military while green represents the Vietnamese jungle. 

These films achieve their effect by using a combination of complementary colors throughout the scenes set in these locations, thus boosting their visual impact on screen.

A complementary color palette is also useful in creating a distinct visual style for your film, allowing it to stand out from others and allowing you to pick up on themes more easily. 

When using complementary colors in your films, you should also try including additional colors that are opposite each other on a color wheel.

These will create a more striking visual effect on screen than if you were to try and use three or more colors from around the same area on this circle. This will help you create an even stronger visual contrast between your two opposing sides of your story.

For more on complementary colors, read our article about it.

Guillermo Del Toro Fantastic Triadic Colors

Guillermo Del Toro has a very distinct and colorful style when it comes to his movies. His worlds are filled with rich colors, deep textures, and an overall vibe of fantasy and horror.

For each movie he makes, he creates an overall color scheme that is used throughout the production design, costumes, and set designs. These elements all come together to create this aesthetic that makes you feel like you’re in a world unlike our own.

Trying to recreate this look can be tricky if you don’t understand the thought process behind it. But once you understand what makes up these color palettes, it’s not difficult to recreate them for your own work.

Del Toro’s color schemes follow a triadic color palette: three colors that are evenly spaced on the color wheel. The triadic spectrum is made up of three colors equidistant from one another on the color wheel.

These three colors are chosen because they have similar intensity levels, but have enough contrast between them so they don’t appear muddy when side-by-side. To get an idea of this concept in action, let’s take a look at an example from Del Toro’s work, The Shape of Water (2017). Here’s a still image from the trailer:

Guillermo Del Toro The Shape Of Water Color Palette

“Hi, my name is Aradhya Singh. I am a design enthusiast and have a passion for creating digital artworks. This time, I am back with the creation of a poster for Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water. You can watch the movie on Netflix.

I have used Adobe Illustrator to draw the artwork using Shape and Path tool and Pen Tool. The poster took me 2 days to complete along with some research on the internet. Here are the steps which I followed to create this poster:

The Shape Of Water Poster Design Steps

To start off I created a new file in Adobe Illustrator (File> New)

Then I created a shape using the Ellipse Tool (M) which i made little bit smaller than my art board, then using Direct Selection Tool(A) adjusted the handles to make it rounder. 

After that I made 3 more copy’s of the same shape and all of them were smaller than the previous one.

(Each time pressing Ctrl+D). This is because I wanted my poster to be in 3D effect so that when it will be viewed from different angles each image will look in front of each other instead of overlapping each other.”

Guillermo Del Toro Monsters And Character Design

I’ve been working in the film industry for 25 years and I have always said, “I’m not interested in monsters. 

I’m interested in monsters that are symbolic and scary.” For example, Pan’s Labyrinth has a big bug in it. The big bug is a metaphor of fascism and oppression. But the bug is still scary.

Troll Hunter was the result of my saying to the producers, “Listen guys, I don’t want to do monsters anymore. 

Let’s do a movie that doesn’t have any monsters in it.” And they said, “What if you have trolls?” And I thought, “Well, that’s funny.” 

And then after about three seconds of laughing at their joke, I realized that there was something really interesting about making a movie about trolls where we don’t see them…

There are movies like Predator where the monster is so cool looking that you put the camera on him for 85% of the time and it works like gangbusters. 

In other words, if you make a movie about an alien with four jaws and he eats people and shoots with acid blood, which is what Predator does – brilliantly – you can give him most of your attention because he’s visually interesting…

Guillermo Del Toro Trauma And Other Themes

In Director Guillermo del Toro’s cinematic universe, art and life bleed together in the most intensely personal way.

The Mexican writer-director is drawn to fantastical stories about artists and their struggles, from his Oscar-winning Spanish-language film Pan’s Labyrinth to his new English-language movie The Shape of Water, which he co-wrote and directed.

The latter tells the story of a mute cleaning woman who falls for an amphibious man and helps him escape from a government lab in the 1960s. “It’s a love story between two people that are deeply different and have to overcome that difference,” del Toro says. “It’s set in America in 1962, but there is a lot of my life in this movie.”

In fact, del Toro made The Shape of Water with his own past trauma in mind: “I was kidnapped when I was seven years old,” he says, explaining how the ordeal informed his work. “It was a very difficult experience.” 

Del Toro spent six months writing the film on spec before he landed financing because he could relate so deeply to its main characters. In fact, he says, they were almost too similar.