Remaking Color Sofia Molina

This thesis explores the evolution of cinematic color identity across historical periods. Using film remakes as a comparative framework, the research analyzes how identical narratives are chromatically reinterpreted over different decades to reflect changing aesthetic sensibilities. Remakes offer a unique opportunity to observe how the same narrative is visually reinterpreted in different decades, allowing aesthetic differences to be analyzed while the underlying story remains relatively constant. By comparing films that share the same narrative but were produced in different historical contexts, the project investigates how color palettes and chromatic atmospheres evolve across cinematic eras. By integrating traditional film analysis with computational methods—specifically extracting dominant palettes from posters and sampling color distributions from trailers—the project translates cinematic data into comparative visualizations. Ultimately, this work reveals broader patterns in cinematic color usage and contributes to both film studies and data visualization by offering a novel, structured approach to examining aesthetic transformations within visual culture.