Colour is one of the most powerful tools for a visual artist. It is perfect to describe emotions and feels and after hundreds of years of hystory and essays, our culture has developed a language made of association between colours and meanings. Red is passion but is also blood and violence, green is hope, white is uncontaminated purity and black is death, while  in Asian cultures white means mourning and people wears it at funerals. These are just few exhamples but there’s much more I don’t have the time and the competence to describe the full range of possibilities of such a powerful language.

If you have been at Pixar’s exhibition that is traveling the world you know how this studio uses colours and thinks about them before starting the actual production of the movie. They create a storyboard that picture the dominant colour of each sequence in order to communicate effectively the emotions they want in each scene (you can see two examples from Up and The Incredibles).

That’s pretty much what the director did in this video. He used colours to follow the emotional evolution of the song. It is made of archive material, cut and pasted together which has been coloured to enhance or change the image’s meaning. Clouds wouldn’t be disturbing if they weren’t orange, and the red sequence at the end of the clip enhances the apocalyptic feel created by the sequences which portrait hurricanes, earthquakes and scenes from the 50′s Japanese version of Godzilla.

The other interesting element of this clip is the counter placed in foreground. At first i didn’t understand what it stood for but then I realized it was the elapsed time. It enhances the sensation of anxiety created by the images and the music, mostly because it is a big number, it’s like it’s saying “you’re wasting your time, a lot of it”, but if you’re watching this video, I’m sure you’re not wasting anything.