Research on Color Narrative and Visual Language of Film and Television Animation in the Digital Media Era
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Abstract
In the digital media era, film and television animation has been reshaped across creation, dissemination, and reception. Color has moved beyond decorative use and has become a narrative medium embedded in story structure, character construction, emotional rhythm, and thematic expression, while visual language has expanded from conventional lens, composition, and lighting systems to digital special effects, virtual lighting, real-time rendering, dynamic color tones, and interactive images. In response to the overuse of standardized color look-up tables and the resulting separation between visual spectacle and narrative logic, this study builds a theoretical framework of animation color narrative and visual language grammar. It clarifies the vocabulary, sentence, structural, and rhetorical layers of color narration, analyzes functions such as time-space definition, character shaping, emotional rhythm control, thematic metaphor, and narrative guidance, and proposes collaborative creative strategies for pre-production, production, and post-production. The findings provide systematic guidance for digital animation creation and are also relevant to optical propagation, digital display, and electromagnetic-light interaction in high-fidelity visual presentation systems.
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