I have to admit that I did not manage to achieve my original intention for this piece. I wanted to have a two-layer video titled SHAPE; where the bottom layer would be the video I edited as it is here, and the top layer would be simple geometric shapes programmatically controlled by the music. However, editing the video took so unexpectedly long that I only managed to animate the first few seconds of the video in Processing, so I made the decision to cut that layer out rather than submit a half-baked version of the concept.

As for the video concept, I found it interesting that “Bye-bye Blues” has such a seemingly upbeat and positive atmosphere when the title claims that it is blues. At first as I listened, I envisioned bustling and playful city scenes, as in the first part of the video. As I listened to it more and more, I felt that there was an undertone of sweet sadness: a narrative began to develop in my head; I wanted to investigate the notion of nostalgia and melancholy that we might carry about with us even as we go through normal or even happy days. I wanted to investigate laughing grief, the liberating and almost comic relief that comes after a good hard cry. I imagined someone going about their busy day in the city, working their 9-to-5 job, sitting in a lively diner, then as it does, the pent-up grief of some goodbye begins to flow out, first with resistance, then in the form of memories whose flow from one into the other cannot be resisted. The scene of the car running off the cliff is especially important to me; it represents the willful and paradoxically liberating self-destruction that is grief.