I have been thinking about empathy lately.
Not the Hallmark-card version of empathy. The other kind. The kind where somebody else’s pain gets handed to you, and because you can see it, you pick it up.
Then somebody else hands you something.
And somebody else.
And somebody else.
Pretty soon you’re walking around with a ridiculous bunch of balloons that nobody else can see.
That became The Colors We Carry.
1/9
The idea arrived before the film did.
I wanted to make something about the burden of empathy.
A friend had once described empathy as one of the biggest problems for intelligent people. That sentence stuck with me.
I kept thinking about what it would look like if every emotional burden someone handed you became a physical object.
A balloon seemed almost too silly.
Which was exactly why I liked it.
The film could be serious without becoming heavy-handed. The balloons could be beautiful, inconvenient, funny, absurd and eventually liberating.
That was the seed.
2/9
The rule was simple.
Someone gives the woman something.
We don’t necessarily see what it is.
Then there is a tiny fairy-twinkle sound.
Cut.
There is a balloon.
That was important because I didn’t want to make the handoffs into elaborate magical effects. AI video is perfectly capable of producing a hand with six fingers attempting to perform a supernatural transfer of an emotionally significant balloon.
I decided I could live without that particular contribution from artificial intelligence.
So the edit does the magic.
Interaction.
Twinkle.
Cut.
Balloon.
Once the audience understands the rule, we can stop showing every handoff.
3/9
The balloons start accumulating
This is where the sound design became more important than the pictures.
The first balloon is charming.
The second is interesting.
The fifth is inconvenient.
By the time Spark is carrying a ridiculous cluster of them through professional meetings, the joke has stopped being quite so funny.
And then I had an idea for the sound.
Every time something gets added:
Twinkle.
Ka-ching.
Twinkle.
Ka-ching.
The cash register sound is deliberately a little funny. But underneath the joke is another idea.
She is accumulating things that don’t belong to her.
Someone else’s fear.
Someone else’s grief.
Someone else’s crisis.
Someone else’s expectations.
Another emotional transaction.
Ka-ching. There is an emotional cost.
4/9
The black-screen trick.
I didn’t want to make fifty little balloon handoff scenes.
So I cheated.
Or, more accurately, I edited.
At certain points the screen goes black while the sounds continue.
Twinkle.
Ka-ching.
Twinkle.
Ka-ching.
Twinkle.
Ka-ching.
The sounds accelerate.
Then silence.
And we cut back to Spark.
Now she is surrounded by an enormous cluster of balloons.
I love this kind of shortcut because the audience’s imagination does some of the production work for me.
Lab note:
Sometimes the cheapest visual effect is letting the audience create it themselves.
5/9
AI still had to make the impossible look ordinary.
The challenge wasn’t really making balloons.
The challenge was making the balloons belong to the same reality as the woman.
They had to follow her into offices.
They had to get caught in doorways.
They had to make getting into a car ridiculous.
They had to fill the passenger compartment.
And, most importantly, nobody else could see them.
That last part is the whole metaphor.
The world doesn’t see what she is carrying.
She does.
The audience does.
That’s it.
I generated the still images in Midjourney and then animated them in Grok Imagine.
The Midjourney images established the character, environments and balloon compositions. Grok’s job was much simpler: make the woman walk, make the balloons move, make the camera move.
I learned something useful in the process.
The less I asked the video model to invent, the better it behaved.
6/9
Then the balloons did something I didn’t expect.
The film could have ended with Spark getting home and simply putting the balloons down.
But that felt wrong.
Those balloons represent empathy. They aren’t simply garbage that she can throw away.
So I sent her to a park.
She sits alone.
The balloons begin pulling upward.
And suddenly the burden becomes buoyancy.
The very things that were weighing her down begin lifting her.
She rises above the trees.
Above the city.
And for a little while, she gets to see the world from somewhere else.
That became the emotional center of the film for me.
The balloons aren’t entirely bad.
Empathy hurts.
But empathy also gives you a particular way of seeing the world.
7/9
And then I saw the flowers.
I knew she couldn’t stay floating around forever.
Eventually the balloons bring her back down.
She walks home.
She reaches her doorstep.
And there are flowers waiting for her.
This is the part that got me.
Because I knew what the flowers meant.
But I didn’t put a card there.
I didn’t put a message on the screen.
I didn’t explain anything.
The film is the gift.
She reaches for the flowers.
And the balloons begin slipping out of her hand.
One rises.
Pop.
Another.
Pop.
Another.
Pop.
Eventually the last balloon rises into the evening sky.
Pop.
And then she picks up the flowers.
That’s the whole ending.
8/9
The production stack
Midjourney — character reference, environments and cinematic still images
Grok Imagine — image-to-video animation
Grok Automation — batch processing of the finished stills
Kdenlive — editing, pacing, compositing and final sound design
Pixabay — free sound effects
Google Flow Music — AI music — three continuous musical movements
The sound design ended up being surprisingly economical.
I only needed a small library of effects: the fairy twinkle, cash register, balloon movement, balloon pop, basic footsteps, street ambience, indoor ambience and wind.
The important ones were the first three.
Twinkle.
Ka-ching.
Pop.
Receive.
Accumulate.
Release.
9/9
The real lesson
I think I finally understand why this film moved me before I had even made it.
I wasn’t really imagining balloons.
I was imagining what it feels like to watch someone give and give and give until there isn’t much room left inside their own life.
And I was imagining something else, too.
Sometimes loving someone doesn’t mean helping them carry everything.
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is help them put something down.
Maybe that’s what the balloons are really about.
Not getting rid of empathy.
Not becoming less caring.
Just learning that every burden you can see is not necessarily yours to carry forever.
Lab note:
The strange thing about making films with AI is that I often start with an idea I think I understand.
Then I build the thing.
And somewhere between the prompt, the accidental image, the sound effect, the edit and the music, the film tells me what I was actually thinking about.
The machine doesn’t understand empathy.
I do.
The machine doesn’t understand what the flowers mean.
I do.
But somehow, by throwing enough pixels, balloons, sounds and music into the same creative laboratory, we can arrive at something neither of us would have produced alone.
That’s the alchemy.
I supply the feeling.
The machines supply the impossible.
And somewhere in the middle, a film appears.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA