The starting point of my animated poem was a key takeaway from my reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, regarding the unpredictable nature of the future and humanity’s continuous denial of this fact. Thus, the quintessence of my poem captured this disparity between our perception of the future and its reality.
To embody humanity’s distorted percept of having control over the future, I created a structured, orderly progression for the first 10 seconds through multiple methods. The word “FUTURE” appeared one letter at a time in equal time increments, a perfectly circular dot and horizontal line symbolized a clearly defined starting point, and the monochromatic color scheme personified humankind’s false “black and white” view of the future. The quotation marks around the word “FUTURE” was another way of conveying that this orderly future, occuring in a logical step-by-step fashion, is indeed not the reality of the future, but rather the “future” according to people’s inaccurate view. Thus, their eventual disappearance was a deliberate indication that what was next to come in the video represented the future as it truly is.
Once the quotation marks are gone, the once straight horizontal line immediately swerves into a twisting and turning pattern: a metaphor for the impossibility of foreseeing the future. At first, this pattern seems unpredictable, but eventually multiple infinity signs emerge--a visual representation of the second word of the poem: “forever.” This word is also symbolized by the color blue (appearing in the last part of the video), which was deliberately chosen as the only color outside of the video’s black-and-white monochrome theme. The final image of ocean waves take on a light turquoise, a bright and optimistic hue that contrasts the choppy movement and chaotic black strokes of the water. This visual juxtaposition portrays the complexity of all that is to come--filled with beauty, joy, uncertainty, suffering, and everything in between--and ties in perfectly with the last word of the poem: “fluid.” I especially loved this word in describing the future, as I feel it creates the perfect image that both conveys limitless possibilities, as well as the ever-shifting nature of the future. With each tiny decision, each seemingly insignificant event, our futures are changed forever.