Post 2 - 9/15/21 - Bouncing Ball

 

    For my assignment, I wanted to play with the colors and shapes in an abstract design. I like to take inspiration from my own experiences with synesthesia, where my mind associates certain music with unrelated subjects, like colors, locations, visuals, words, textures, etc. With the bouncing ball, I decided to go with some of the visuals I got while listening to Billie Elish's album Happier Than Ever, which has many songs about a toxic relationship that ended badly, and the grief/anger/depression-fueled fantasies that follow. 

    The song "Oxytocin," a high-octane, hormonal-driven song expresses the tension left from a poor relationship, resulting in primarily only wanting to "do bad things to you," and has the sensation of speeding down the highway, pissed off, and blasting the stereo system.  This kind of visual is also used in the album's concert film Happier Than Ever; A Love Letter to Los Angeles. "Lost Cause" expresses the melancholy of a seemingly one-sided relationship, wishing the other half would reciprocate their affection, with "I sent you flowers, did you even care?" which is mirrored near the end of the song with "(you) gave me no flowers, wish I didn't care."

    With that, the short story I created with my abstracted animation is someone expressing the same emotions of Billie Eilish, or just Billie Eilish herself, drops the flower as a symbol of letting go of a toxic,  manipulative friendship or relationship; then taking out the anger/pain back on the other person by driving by them fast enough to cause a puddle in the road to jump up and splash all over them. 

    I chose to use the bouncing ball as a device to tell the story in a way similar to comic book panels, with the frame being divided into sections that each tell one specific part of the story. The first frame with the unempathetic expression rises from the dropped flower, leading into the headlights of a speeding car, The frame is separated as the 3rd segment of the bouncing sequence with a tire tread pattern, indicating the speed of the racing car. From under the tire's tread rises the last segment, a blue wave, that splashes up onto the intended victim. In the same unempathetic gaze, Billie watches the other person become defenseless from a life-long bad memory; returning the favor.