This idea of darkness came to me when I was falling asleep one night and realized that when the lights are switched off, everything – all the colors – is just gone, except darkness. Hence, I chose dots of different colors on a black canvas as my first element, to contrast with the darkness. Humans intrinsically fear and repel the dark. Darkness is considered plain, ugly, boring, and often associated with a boogeyman – something sinister, terrible, and “child-eating”, which is why I chose it as my second element/first metaphor for darkness. However, I also explore the concept that if we switch our perspective and embrace the darkness, we’ll find that it embraces us back – soothing and welcoming. Therefore, my third element/second metaphor is the silhouette of an embrace. I initially also considered a scar as a metaphor because you can choose to see it as something ugly or beautiful. I didn’t at the end as I really preferred the contrast between boogeyman and embrace.

I’ve never done animation before, so this was difficult but fun. I used various fonts, effects and gestures for my texts to visually reflect their meaning. For instance, I literally made the phrase “blinking out” blink out of the scene, and while the word “plain” is typed out bluntly and “ugly” looks as ugly as it claims, “soothing” appeared smoothly. I contrasted the text “boring” against the colorful background to enhance the effect. In addition, the boogeyman appeared against a dark background which helped bind darkness to its metaphor, and the text “child-eating” here visually interacts with the image so that it’s literally “eaten” by the boogeyman. I ended the animation with the text “darkness” being the only thing remaining and eventually darkness really was the only thing that remained.