Enhancing your video with colour

How to subtly blend colour into a video, to enhance your message, brand or story

When you’re creating on Binumi, your first thought might not be ‘what colours should I use?’. However, with a game plan on how and what colours you want to feature in your video, you may just start to see some amazing improvements in how your videos look, feel and perform.

Psychology and colour

Colours can provoke strong emotional reactions, even when the viewer is unaware of the connection. The chart below shows some of the ways that colours have been proven to impact mood or influence a decision; 

Image from usertesting.com

It’s no secret that many successful global brands use colour as a part of their sales and business strategy. Take a look at fast food chain McDonalds for example; their use of red and yellow across their branding is no happy accident. The red inspires excitement, and the yellow suggests happiness – what a perfect combination for a food chain that wants to present itself as the go-to nostalgic chain for families. 

Picking a palette

When it comes to your own business, you are likely to already have a set of brand guidelines in place that determine what colours you can/can’t use in your communications. If you don’t…lucky you! This puts you in a unique position of choosing a palette from scratch that will help to position your business exactly how you want it. Think about how traditional your target customer is – what would resonate with them best? How would they react to a change from the norm? Would it be delightful or disorienting? What message would your company be sending if your color scheme broke away from traditional expectations? Answering all these questions will help you to land on a palette that works for you.

For those with existing brand guidelines, it’s much simpler to zone in on your colour scheme and base your visual communication around that. However, there is one more consideration beyond just using your basic brand colours – and that is how light or dark the visuals are. The use of either black or white shades in your communications also has a big impact on user reaction, no matter what your key brand colours are. 

Black shades are associated with formality, sophistication and security – while white shades are seen as clean, honest and simple. 

Using colour in videos 

Applying colour to your videos is not always just a case of changing all the graphics to your brand colour. It is also important to think about the shots you use, as they form the main basis of any video. 

This doesn’t mean that every shot can only have just those colours in! For example, if your brand colours are blue and white, you don’t need to only use shots of oceans and clouds. Just choose shots with a touch of those colours in; like a neat desk set up with a blue coffee cup, or white snow falling on a dark pavement.

To search for these perfect shots in the Binumi library, use your desired colour as one of the keywords – for example ‘red coffee cup’ or ‘green sofa’. This should help to pull up a number of shots that would be perfect for your video. It is also worth saving any shots that work in your favourites folder, to use them again later.

Colour is a very important tool to connect with your target audience on a deeper level; by matching your colour palette to your brand and therefore to what your users expect to see from you, you increase the chances of your video not just being watched but also being remembered. 

Time to start applying colours to your videos!

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