"Ten": The Color Test

One of the first decisions I made about the new film was that it would be in black & white. There were two main reasons for this. The first is that the story was originally going to be a next chapter in the "Blast Reynolds" adventures. Eventually, I decided I wanted to start with a new hero and go for something a little less hokey than the Flash Gordon serials approach I used with the original. Yet monochrome still had a classic and crisp look to it, so that element stayed.

The second reason was a matter of supply. Although I have a generous amount of LEGO, I don't have that much, especially when you consider the scope of this film and the number of large scale sets involved. Doing black & white allows me to use the more garish colors I have buckets of because it all comes out in shades of grey. Besides, when dealing with a story that predominantly takes place on a barren moonscape, color is less of a concern.

The next step, before the building of the sets, was to gauge what colors looked like when made monochromatic. So I performed a test:

Here we have a list of the predominant LEGO colors in my collection. The bottom ten represents the largest share, while the top four I only have in smaller amounts. As you can see, some colors that are strikingly different such as red and blue become nearly the same hue in monochrome.

(And for those non-LEGO people out there, "Bley" is a nickname for a sickly blueish grey color that LEGO recently started using in their sets.)

So I now have a guide for when I'm building the sets so that I have an idea what they will look like in back & white. And not only the sets, but the cast of characters as well... which will be in my next update.

Next week: The Cast