After listening to “Bye Bye Blues” for the twelfth (?) time, I still had trouble figuring out what I wanted out of the piece. I think I was looking for meaning from the music or from bits of film. But as I listened to the track again and sifted through more footage, I realized that I wanted to tell a story, and that “Bye Bye Blues” set an interesting stage I could use.
The introduction of the video features scattered scenes that foreshadow our story. I deliberately avoided introducing the characters, since I only wanted the visual stage to be set. We cannot piece together the meaning of these images yet, but the sequence primes our minds to notice them later on as the film progresses.
Each phrase and its echo tells the story of the little girl and the lab rat. The repeating phrases help emphasize the metaphor between the two protagonists and their intertwined stories. More subtly in the film, however, is the parallel between the predator chasing the girl and the war clips (along with the rat poison). The climactic scene with the tanks being loaded and firing after the girl gets cornered was a deliberate metaphor as well. I had fun with rhythm and syncopation (although it was a bit of a pain to edit); I think the progression from long, stable clips to short syncopated ones aligns with the rising levels of tension in the story.
Overall, I’m very pleased with how this project turned out. I think I’m also beginning to understand the impetus behind my work in general (and how that translates beyond this class). I struggled to give this piece a title that I’m happy with, so for now it will be the name of the track.
The page was started with Mobirise