Quiz: Can you guess the movie based only on its colors?

One of the often overlooked ways that movie directors can tell a story is through a film's colors. The color palette used for a movie's scenery, the characters' clothing, and the props helps transport the viewer to magical kingdoms, outer space, or post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Dillon Baker, a junior interaction design student at the University of Washington, has created some fascinating data visualizations that demonstrate this principle. Baker used a computer program to calculate the average color of each frame for several popular movies. He compressed those colors into narrow vertical slices and arranged them in sequential order, from left to right, in the visualizations below.

We've turned the visualizations into a quiz. See if you can guess which films these graphics represent, before scrolling down to read more about the project.

This isn't the first time films have been represented this way: The Colors of Motion and Movie Barcode are examples of somewhat similar projects.

Baker, who created the visualizations, tells us that, of all the examples above, WALL-E is his favorite, transitioning from a monochrome, deserted Earth to the vivid blues of space and back to a more vibrant, recolonized Earth. "Animation studios like Pixar often map out color scripts that directly convey the moods and stories behind their movies, and Wall-E is a great example of that process," he writes.

You can check out Baker's site and more visualizations here.

You might also like: 

-Haunting photos show forgotten — and forbidden — buildings in America

-Movies use this simple camera trick to make you see them very differently

-How a dog sees a rainbow, and 12 other images that explain how we see color