When I first listened to “Bye Bye Blues”, I immediately got the sense that there is more to the happy, upbeat music – a sense of deceptive cheerfulness. I thought this piece of music is perfect for capturing the illusion and fragility of seemingly perfect lives spiralling out of control – everything always looks perfect from the outside, but on the inside, there’s hidden chaos, stress, and emotional exhaustion. I suppose I was also partially inspired by “The Truman Show” in this regard. I started by following the lives of two characters – a businessman and a showgirl as they get ready for their day and go on with their lives. However, as time went on, I wanted to capture how they both got lost in the business of life as there’s just so much going on around them and within them. This all ended in an explosion at the climax of the music before rinse and repeat again, kind of like being stuck in a loop. During the morning routine section, I chose black and white footage of the businessman to bring out the gravity and monotony of his work, and colored footage of the showgirl to illustrate her seemingly colorful and glossy life. As the video progresses, these two visual worlds begin to merge and collapse through faster cuts and overlapping imagery, reflecting how either way, both characters are ultimately trapped in the same endless cycle of performance and burnout — only their façades differ.

I haven’t really done video editing before, especially not when we needed to match the videos to the audio as well, so it was quite challenging at first. I started by doing a cross cut between the morning routine of a showgirl and a businessman to show the two seemingly “perfect” lives. I also used quite a lot of cutting on action, cut away, and fade in/fade out. I also played around a bit with transitions. For instance, during the morning routine section, I used mostly simple straight cuts to convey the sense of picture-perfect order, control and balance of the everyday routine. I also added a few blinking transitions between shots in the morning routine to literally mimic the act of just waking up. For the ending, after the dramatic explosion that symbolizes the breakdown of these “perfect” lives, I ironically cut back to the opening clips, but this time, I played them in reverse. This decision to cycle back to the beginning implies that life will go on, the monotony will restart, and the stress will inevitably build up again. Because that’s just life. Also, I made sure to gradually speed up my clips or increase the frequency of clips as the video went on to match the increasing pace of the audio, until the eventual climactic explosion. The only time I altered the audio in this case is at the start of the explosion – I realized that the sound of the bomb matches surprisingly well with the audio at that specific moment, so I edited the audio there for extra effect. Overall, I’m quite happy with how the project turned out. I especially enjoyed matching the cuts to the rhythm and beat of the audio, which sometimes conveys messages across, sometimes just for artistic effect. This, combined with the motif of clocks, transitions, and repetition, also emphasized the mechanical routine of the two characters.