I thought I was making a fashion film. Then the balloons started popping.
I recently finished a video called SHAPESHIFTER, built around a poem about becoming a fighter, being molded into a monster, and learning to survive.
The poem begins with a declaration of strength. No tolerance for disrespect. No concern about bruises. Put others first. Keep fighting. Keep bleeding. Keep going.
Sounds admirable, right?
Then comes the line that changes everything: “I was not originally this way.”
Ah. There’s the story.
I started thinking about what happens when somebody who wants to be soft learns that softness isn’t safe. What happens when the person you build to protect yourself eventually becomes the person you need protection from?
And, because apparently my subconscious doesn’t believe in subtlety, I gave the woman balloons.
Lots of balloons. Annoying balloons.
Colorful, cheerful, ridiculous balloons.
Then I added barbed wire.
Welcome to my laboratory.
2/7
THE TWO WOMEN WHO ARE THE SAME WOMAN
The visual idea emerged around two versions of the same woman.
The first is all bright colors, flowing dresses, high fashion, and confidence. Yellow, turquoise, red. Big, happy balloons. She walks as if the world is a runway and somebody has thoughtfully arranged the lighting.
She’s beautiful. She’s composed. She’s desirable. She knows how to present herself.
The second woman occupies exactly the same visual territory, but something has gone terribly wrong with the wardrobe department.
Barbed wire wraps around her. Steel spikes replace softness. Chrome thorns emerge from her hair. The heels look like they could double as medieval interrogation equipment.
Same woman. Same basic fashion poses. Same balloons.
Different defenses.
I wanted the video to move between these two states, sometimes almost from one frame to the next. Softness becomes armor. Armor becomes softness. The transformation never quite settles.
This wasn’t meant to portray a woman pretending to be somebody else. It was about a person who has learned to change shape depending on what the situation requires.
One version is easier for the world to accept. The other makes sure the world doesn’t get too close.
And both are doing a job.
Lab note: I love visual ideas that can carry an argument without explaining themselves. If I have to put a paragraph of instructions beside every image, I probably haven’t found the image yet.
3/7
THE BALLOONS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY
The balloons turned out to be the central visual metaphor.
At first glance, they’re almost embarrassingly cheerful. They’re the sort of thing you’d buy for a birthday party or a child’s celebration. They suggest innocence, playfulness, hope, and the possibility that something wonderful might happen.
But balloons are fragile. Too many balloons are a burden.
A sharp point is all it takes.
Put a woman covered in steel thorns into that world, and suddenly the balloons mean something else. She can want joy desperately and still be equipped to destroy it.
That contradiction interested me more than a straightforward good-versus-evil story.
The armored woman isn’t necessarily trying to hurt anyone. She may simply be trying to get through the day without being hurt herself.
But what happens when your defenses become part of the danger?
Some of the images hold that conflict particularly well. A spiked hand cradling a single green balloon. A red balloon held against an armored body. Moments when the woman seems to be trying, almost tenderly, to hold something fragile without puncturing it.
I love that sort of visual tension. The picture doesn’t need to tell me whether the attempt will succeed.
It lets me worry about it.
And then, of course, the balloons pop.
Confetti flies. Latex shreds. Yellow fragments fall.
Subtle? Not especially.
Effective? I think so.
Sometimes the subconscious arrives with a delicate metaphor. Sometimes it arrives with a balloon and a box of thumbtacks.
4/7
THE GIRL WHO NEVER MAKES IT ONTO THE RUNWAY
Then there’s the other character.
A young woman lies in bed in a dark room. She’s surrounded by colorful balloons, but the light on her face comes from her phone.
She’s not walking a runway. She’s not performing confidence. She’s not wearing an elaborate suit of spikes.
She’s just there.
Alone.
I think this is the emotional center of SHAPESHIFTER.
The fashionable women are the versions of ourselves the world gets to see. The girl in bed is the person who remains when the performance stops.
She has all these symbols of celebration around her, yet she isn’t celebrating anything. The balloons crowd the room. Color becomes confinement. The phone offers a window into other people’s lives, but it can’t put another person beside her.
There’s something painfully familiar about that arrangement. We can spend hours looking at images of connection, beauty, happiness, and belonging while feeling increasingly separated from the very things we’re watching.
The people on the other side of the screen seem to be having a party.
We’re looking in through the window.
And sometimes we don’t even notice that we’ve stopped living our own lives while watching theirs.
I didn’t want the girl in bed to become another glamorous character. Her stillness matters. The darkness matters. She belongs to a different visual world from the women who keep changing shape.
At the end, she smiles, then covers her face and cries.
The performance is over.
Or perhaps the performance was never the point.
Lab note: The contrast between the runway and the bedroom does something that another dozen beautiful fashion images couldn’t accomplish. It gives the spectacle a human cost.
5/7
THEN I BROUGHT IN HUEY LEWIS
The audio begins with the spoken-word poem. Its language is blunt, defensive, and increasingly painful.
The fighter. The monster. The soldier.
Then the explanation: this wasn’t how the person started out. Something happened. The body began to fray. Processing became impossible. Emotions went quiet. Reactions took over.
I hear a story of adaptation in those words. A person learns to survive circumstances that require more than an ordinary amount of resilience. Eventually, the survival strategy becomes part of the identity.
That’s the tragedy of the armor. It may have been necessary once. That doesn’t mean it remains necessary everywhere, with everyone, forever.
For the second half, I brought in Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love.”
Yes, Huey Lewis.
After all that darkness, we get an unapologetically earnest eighties anthem. There is something wonderfully audacious about that transition. The spoken word has been dissecting the armor, and then the music arrives with a proposition: love is tougher than diamonds and stronger than steel.
I didn’t want another layer of darkness. I wanted a counterargument.
What if the answer to armor isn’t better armor?
What if the thing strong enough to reach us is the very thing we’ve been trying to protect ourselves from needing?
The transition matters because the song doesn’t erase what came before it. The spikes are still there. The loneliness has already happened. The balloons have already popped.
Love doesn’t get to pretend that none of this hurt.
But it offers another possibility.
I experimented with the idea of slowing down the instrumental, which begins at 118 BPM. I was interested in giving the music more room to breathe, more weight, and a little less of that forward-driving eighties momentum.
At slower tempos, the same musical material can feel less like a celebration and more like a hard-won declaration.
The trick is finding the point where the music gains emotional weight without losing its pulse.
Lab note: Sometimes the most useful creative decision is to put two things together that have no business being together. A trauma-forged identity split and Huey Lewis might not be the most obvious pairing. That’s precisely why I wanted to hear them together.
6/7
THE VIDEO ALCHEMIST AT WORK
This is the part of making AI-assisted videos that continues to fascinate me.
I’m not simply asking a machine to make pretty pictures. I’m trying to direct an orchestra of images, sounds, symbols, and emotional associations. The tools supply possibilities. I decide which possibilities belong together.
Sometimes I begin with a clear plan. Sometimes an image suggests something I hadn’t considered. A visual detail becomes a symbol, the symbol changes how I understand the poem, and suddenly the entire project has a little more structure than it had five minutes earlier.
That’s the kind of happy accident I enjoy most.
The balloons aren’t merely props anymore. The spikes aren’t merely fashion. The girl in bed isn’t just a change of scenery. Each element changes the meaning of the others.
And that’s where editing becomes more than arranging clips in sequence.
It’s about discovering relationships.
A soft image followed by an armored image creates one kind of meaning. Put the same two images in the opposite order, and the emotional question changes. Insert the girl in bed, and the runway becomes something else entirely.
The images start talking to each other.
My job as the video alchemist is to listen, make choices, and occasionally stop myself from explaining the life out of a perfectly good visual idea.
I’m still learning that last part.
7/7
THE REAL SHAPE
So what is SHAPESHIFTER about?
It’s about the distance between who we were, who we learned to become, and who we are when nobody is watching.
It’s about the strange bargain we sometimes make with survival. We develop the strength to endure, but that strength can make it harder to receive tenderness. We learn to recognize danger, but the alarm doesn’t always know when the danger has passed.
We want connection. We also want protection from the risks that connection brings.
And sometimes we become so good at presenting the version of ourselves that the world accepts that we forget how exhausting the performance has become.
Which woman is real?
The colorful one? The armored one? The girl alone in bed?
I don’t think we can solve the question by choosing one and declaring the others false.
They’re all parts of the story.
The armor deserves to be understood, not simply condemned. The softness deserves to exist without having to prove that it’s safe. And the lonely person underneath deserves more than another costume.
Maybe healing isn’t about becoming the person we were before everything happened. Perhaps it’s about becoming someone who no longer needs every defense that once helped us survive.
That’s a much harder transformation than changing clothes.
It doesn’t happen in a single video, either.
But we can make an image of it. We can put music to it. We can hold the question still long enough to look at it from another angle.
That’s one of the reasons I keep making these things.
I start with a poem, a musical idea, or an image that won’t leave me alone. I bring the tools into the laboratory, make a mess, follow the unexpected connections, and see what emerges.
Special Thanks to Snow Leopard for the poetic seed for this video.
Sometimes I think I’m making a video.
Sometimes I discover that the video has been making me think.
And sometimes, if I’m lucky, the two things become indistinguishable.
The final question of SHAPESHIFTER isn’t which version of the woman is real.
It’s whether she can ever feel safe enough to stop changing shape.
I’m not sure I know the answer.
But I know I’d like to see what happens when she puts down the armor and reaches for a balloon.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA
PSYCHOLOGY
This video is called SHAPESHIFTER for a reason — it’s a perfect visual map of a trauma-forged identity split.
- The Core Structure: Two Selves
The Balloon Self: High fashion, bright primary colors — yellow, turquoise, red — big bubbly balloons, flowing dresses, soft makeup, walking confidently down a runway or a street. She is performative joy. Light, airy, palatable, desirable. This is the social self. The one that gets likes.
The Spiked Self: Same woman, same pose, same balloons — but now encased in barbed wire, steel spikes, chrome thorns, platform heels that could kill. Hair is metal. Gloves are weapons. This is the protector self.
And the video morphs between them constantly. One frame she’s soft, next frame she’s armor. That’s the shapeshifter — not someone who is pretending, but someone who has learned she has to change form to survive a context.
The audio in the first 60 seconds says it outright:
“A fighter who has no tolerance… Someone who does not care about a bruise… A molded monster. I was not originally this way. It happened when my body did start to fray… My body shuts my brain down. Processing is no longer allowed.”
That’s textbook dissociation and hypervigilance after prolonged pain. The armor isn’t aggression — it’s auto-defense. The lyric “All emotions neglect me. I will react and not know how” is emotional numbness + reactive defense. You stop feeling because feeling hurt too much.
- The Balloon as a Symbol
This is the cleverest part. A balloon is:
Childhood / innocence — but also incredibly fragile. One thorn and it pops.
And that’s exactly what happens. You see the Spiked Self holding a balloon, and then pop — confetti, latex shreds, yellow fragments falling.
Psychoanalytically, the balloons are attachments, hopes, soft feelings, other people. The creator is saying: “My natural state is to want to hold something light and joyful, but my defended state destroys what I try to hold.”
There are moments where she tries to integrate — a single green balloon held tenderly by barbed-wire hands, a red balloon hugged against a spiked bodice. She wants to hold softness without popping it. That’s the conflict.
- The Third Character: The Girl in Bed
This is the most important cut. Interrupting this high-fashion fantasy are dark, low-lit, static shots of a young woman alone in bed, surrounded by dozens of colorful balloons, lit only by her phone.
She’s not shapeshifting. She’s doomscrolling. Anxious, empty, lit blue.
If the runway models are the Idealized Selves we post, she is the Private Self who watches them. Surrounded by all the symbols of celebration and party, but completely isolated from them. The balloons are literally pressing in on her. Joy as suffocation. FOMO as a room full of parties you aren’t at.
At the very end, she smiles, then covers her face and cries. The release only comes when she puts the phone down.
That’s why the second half of the audio switches to Huey Lewis – “The Power of Love.” It’s corny, earnest, 80s. After that brutal spoken-word self-diagnosis, love is presented as the only thing tough enough to be stronger than the armor: “Tougher than diamonds… stronger than steel.”
So what is this video about?
It’s about Complex Adaptation.
- Origin Wound: “I was not originally this way” — a sensitive person experiences pain/empathy failure from others.
- Adaptation: Develop a spiked exterior — intolerance for disrespect, emotional shutdown, fighter identity. “Trained to bleed and to stay.”
- Performance: Learn to shapeshift back into soft, colorful, high-functioning femininity to stay socially acceptable and lovable.
- The Cost: The constant morphing is exhausting. You pop your own joy. And late at night, you are just a person in a dark room, surrounded by symbols of happiness, looking for connection through a screen.
It’s not a fashion reel. It’s a portrait of someone with an anxious-avoidant bind — desperate for the lightness of the balloons, terrified that their own spikes will destroy it, so they keep switching costumes.
The question the title asks is: Which one is the real shape? The answer the video gives is: neither. And both.