Color-Coded Timestop

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(Redirected from Colour-Coded Timestop)
If you had to bet, in which image has time stopped moving?

"Time stopped. Coates faded, in a world made up of shades of gray."

It's hard for authors to make it clear that time has stopped moving or merely slowed down from the character's point of view, and that's because...well, because it doesn't happen in Real Life, time being, in fact, famous for waiting for no man.

This brings forth a problem: how will the viewers know time has stopped? Well, we could just have everything freeze in place, but it would work only in areas where there are a lot of actions (or at least a single movement we can see clearly) to be interrupted at once.

Sometimes, however, the plot demands time to freeze during a scene with no cops shooting bullets to stop in mid-air or falling debris that refuses to fall or clumsy waitresses who drop glasses of water and are comically frozen in an awkward pose trying to catch it. Movies can avoid this easily; they may just refrain filming a timestopped sequence without these visual aids, or perhaps zoom the camera in a bug that froze above the hero's head. Videogames that offer timestop as an ability have no such luxury; a player could try and stop time anywhere from a crowded street to a small empty room, and, as such, a new visual representation is needed.

One common solution for that is to simply colour the area affected by the timestop with a filter, and thus we have a convenient Color-Coded Timestop.

These usually come in two flavors: either the timestopped area changes from colourful to a grayscale or sepira-toned zone, or it may have all of its colours turned negative. These are not the only kind of Color-Coded Timestop, but are certainly the ones that get used the most.

Please note that this trope applies to any Colour-Coded Bullet Time as well

Examples of Color-Coded Timestop include:

Grayscale Timestop

Anime and Manga

  • In Shakugan no Shana, this happens to all of the affected world and characters during the geographically limited time stops employed to limit damage to the Masquerade.

Literature

  • Night Watch: Vimes sees the world as grey during a brief timestopped sequence.

Video Games

Western Animation

  • Justice League second season, episode Only a Dream part 2; the Flash's nightmare where he sped up too much, so that, to him, the world was frozen. Once he understands what is happening, the world changes to grayscale.

Negative Colour Timestop

Anime and Manga

Video Games

Other Colors

Anime and Manga

  • In Cardcaptor Sakura, whenever the Time Card was used, all the things affected by it get covered in yellow.
  • Guldo's time stopping powers in Dragonball Z turn the area purple until he has to breathe again.

Fan Works

Timestops are weird... Everything takes on a bluish cast -- in this case even deeper than the combination of my combat hype and the fading twilight had already given it.

Literature

  • During Terry Pratchett's novel Thief of Time, the title-inspiring apprentice Lobsang learns to slow time around him to an almost-standstill, with the sky and air becoming a deeper blue as he slices seconds even finer. It even becomes a deep purple when he slices so finely that time starts to approach a full stop.
    • Although this was not, strictly speaking, a direct result of Lobsang's slicing. He was just moving so fast that he blueshifted.
  • In the John D. MacDonald story The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything, the titular watch seems to stop time, but actually speeds the user up to the point where it seems that time has stopped. One of the side effects is that (to the user) everything appears red, due to some sort of effect on photon speeds.
    • Spider Robinson's Callahan's-universe novel Lady Slings the Booze features a very similar watch (with explicit reference to MacDonald's story) with the same effect.
  • In Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters, time stopping is signified by a blue haze.

Video Games

  • In Blinx the Time Sweeper, each Time Control tints the world a different colour: purple REW, orange FF, blue PAUSE, green REC, and yellow SLOW. RETRY has no colour, but Blinx 2's Retry is orange.
  • Similarly, in Bunny Must Die, the time powers are colour-coded blue for stopped, pink for rewinding, yellow for slowed and so on.
  • Singularity pulses in Singularity wash over everything in blue-white. Then, time either stops, goes backwards, or goes crazy.
  • Max Payne 2 uses a slight sepia filter for Bullet Time.
  • Witch Time in Bayonetta throws a purple/blue tint over everything, with a translucent clock covering the screen to show how much time you have left.
  • The True Final Boss from Asura's Wrath uses a blue color with his timestop attack.

Web Comics