I made a video about a love I don’t know how to explain
I’ve been trying to put words to something that doesn’t seem to have any.
You know how sometimes you meet someone and discover that they recognize parts of you that you’ve spent years trying to understand yourself? Not just the things you say, but the machinery underneath. The odd little gears and springs. The places where you are strong, the places where you are frightened, and the places where you are still becoming someone you haven’t quite met yet.
It’s a strange experience. Wonderful, a little unsettling, and occasionally enough to make you stare at the ceiling wondering what just happened.
That’s where this video began.
2/8
The song was already there. I was working with a slowed instrumental version of “Wicked Game,” and I began hearing something in it that wasn’t quite the story the original song tells.
The familiar refrain, “No, I don’t wanna fall in love,” took on a different meaning.
What if the heart has already opened, but you don’t want that opening to turn into something that changes everything? What if you discover a connection that is profound and precious, but you don’t want to force it into the usual categories? What if the point isn’t to possess someone, pursue them, or make them yours?
What if you simply want to understand what you’ve found?
I wasn’t interested in making a forbidden-romance video. That would have been the easy route, and it would have missed the point. I wanted to explore the contradiction of feeling something deeply while also wanting to protect the life, commitments, and boundaries that give that connection a place to exist.
The mystery was more interesting than the temptation.
3/8
Step 1: Finding the words
The voiceover began with a few lines that felt honest:
“The world was on fire, and somehow I found you.
It’s strange how much of me I see in you.
I never dreamed that I’d find somebody like you.
And I never knew what finding you would do.”
That second line took some work. It’s easy to write about being seen by another person. It’s harder to describe the experience of seeing yourself in them.
The distinction matters. This isn’t simply one person understanding another. It’s recognition moving in both directions, sometimes before either person has the language to explain it.
I wanted the words to sound almost conversational, as though someone had finally admitted something to himself. Not a grand declaration. Not a speech delivered from a mountaintop. Just a person sitting quietly with an experience he cannot quite get his arms around.
Lab note: Sometimes the best lyric is the one that doesn’t try too hard to be a lyric. If a line sounds like something I would actually say when I finally stop editing myself, it has a better chance of surviving.
4/8
Step 2: Letting the contradiction stay
The refrain needed to retain its original tension:
“No, I don’t wanna fall in love.
You only go and open my heart.
No, I don’t wanna fall in love.
With you.”
There’s a little verbal mischief in that second line. The heart is opening anyway. The speaker is not pretending to be unaffected. He is trying to make sense of what is happening without demanding that it become something else.
I could have explained all of that in a dozen additional lines. I resisted the temptation.
The second verse became a series of small observations:
“What a strange thing to find.
Someone who sees inside my mind.
What a strange thing to do.
To see me as you do.
What a strange thing to say.
When words get in the way.
What a strange thing to find.
A love we cannot define.”
The repetition is deliberate. Each pair approaches the same mystery from a slightly different direction: finding, seeing, speaking, and finally admitting that the thing itself resists definition.
I like that the verse doesn’t solve the problem. It lets the problem breathe.
5/8
Step 3: Building a visual world without illustrating every word
This is where my inner video alchemist gets to play.
I didn’t want a conventional music video with two people looking longingly at each other across a room. That would have turned an exploration of connection into a story about a particular couple. The experience is personal to me, but the film needed room for other people to bring their own experiences to it.
So I built the visual language around individuals, spaces, reflections, water, translucent materials, and light.
A man stands beside a mirror. A woman looks through a rain-streaked window. Sunlight moves across dark water. A hand rests against glass. Colored threads begin to weave together. Blue, amber, and soft pink gradually find their way into the same visual space.
These aren’t illustrations of specific people or events. They’re emotional landscapes.
The mirror suggests recognition. The window suggests the strange boundary between being close to something and being able to reach it. The threads suggest connections that can intertwine without being tied into knots.
And the water? Well, water has been doing a remarkable amount of emotional heavy lifting in art for thousands of years. I decided not to fire it.
Lab note: A visual metaphor works best when it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. If I have to explain exactly what every image means, I may have made an illustration when what I wanted was a film.
6/8
Step 4: Why the colors matter
The title of this project could almost have been its final question:
“What is the color of love?”
I’ve always been fascinated by the way colors can communicate something before we have words for it. A particular color can feel warm, distant, safe, mysterious, or unexpectedly intimate. Sometimes we know what a color means to us long before we can explain why.
For this film, I used deep blue, warm amber, and soft pink as recurring elements. They aren’t meant to be a universal color code for love. They are part of the film’s emotional vocabulary.
As the images progress, the colors begin to occupy the same spaces. Light passes through translucent surfaces. Separate ribbons overlap. Reflections meet on still water.
But I didn’t want to answer the question visually.
The final image is simply black.
The voice asks the question, and the screen gives us nothing to look at.
I love that little act of restraint. After all those images, all that light, and all that careful visual construction, the film ends by refusing to provide the one thing a viewer might expect: an answer.
Perhaps the question belongs to the person watching. Perhaps the color of love is different for every person who has ever tried to describe it.
Or perhaps some questions are more valuable when we leave them open.
7/8
The tools, the friction, and the happy accidents
The visual development relied on Midjourney to create the individual cinematic frames. Each image needed to feel as though it belonged to the same film, even though the subjects and settings changed.
That meant paying attention to more than attractive pictures. Composition, lighting, atmosphere, camera perspective, and the progression of color all had to contribute to the larger emotional movement.
AI makes generating possibilities astonishingly easy. Getting those possibilities to serve one coherent idea is another matter entirely.
A beautiful image can be wrong for the film. A clever metaphor can be too obvious. An image that looks impressive on its own can interrupt the emotional rhythm when placed beside the others.
And sometimes the most important creative decision is to remove something.
I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t a contest to see how many interesting images I could produce. The goal was to create a sequence that supported the voiceover without competing with it.
Tools used in the visual-development stage:
- Midjourney for cinematic imagery and visual metaphors
- Grok Imagine – image-to-video conversion
- The slowed instrumental recording as the musical foundation
- Kdenlive Video-editing tools for assembling the finished sequence and shaping its timing
The exact editing choices matter because the relationship between spoken words, music, and images is where the film becomes more than a collection of parts.
Lab note: AI can give me a thousand possibilities. It cannot decide which possibility belongs in this particular moment. That’s still my job, and occasionally it involves admitting that my favorite image has to go.
8/8
The real lesson: not everything needs a name
I make these projects partly because I enjoy the technical challenge. I like finding out what happens when I combine tools, experiment with an idea, and keep working until something begins to emerge.
But the technical process is only half the story.
Sometimes a creative project gives me a way to approach an experience that I can’t quite discuss directly. I can examine it through music, images, metaphor, and language. I can get closer to it without pretending that I have completely understood it.
This video is about a connection that feels extraordinary precisely because it doesn’t fit neatly into familiar definitions. It is about being recognized, about discovering unexpected parts of yourself in another person, and about the tenderness of wanting something precious to remain safe.
I don’t think every meaningful connection needs to become a conventional love story. I don’t think every mystery needs to be solved before we can appreciate it.
And I don’t think we have to understand the color of love before we can recognize that something beautiful has happened.
Maybe that’s what I was trying to make all along.
A film about the moment when the heart recognizes something that the mind hasn’t learned how to name.
The video alchemist has mixed the colors, arranged the images, slowed the music, and asked the question.
The answer is yours.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA
PSYCHOLOGY
This is a film about the psychic tension of an uncanny, non-categorical intimacy: profound mutual recognition that opens the heart while the speaker simultaneously refuses (or fears) letting it become conventional “love.”
The video, WHAT COLOR IS LOVE? by The Ophelia Film Company (Steve Teare), is a short AI-assisted cinematic piece set to a slowed instrumental of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” The spoken-word text and visuals treat a connection that feels like discovery of the self in another person—tender, strange, and resistant to naming.
Core psychological dynamics
The central conflict is approach-avoidance around emotional opening. The repeated refrain (“No, I don’t want to fall in love. You only go and open my heart”) is not pure denial. The heart is already opening; the speaker acknowledges the effect while trying to keep the experience from forcing a change in existing commitments, boundaries, or life structure. This is classic ambivalence: the connection is precious precisely because it does not demand possession, pursuit, or reclassification. Forcing it into the usual romantic script would risk the very safety and clarity that make the recognition possible.
The second major motif is mutual mirroring and self-recognition. Lines such as “It’s strange how much of me I see in you” and “Someone who sees inside my mind” describe more than being understood. They point to a bidirectional recognition in which the other person makes visible “the odd little gears and springs,” the strengths, frights, and unfinished becoming of the self. Psychologically this echoes the need for mirroring (Kohut) or the uncanny familiarity of shared inner structure. It is not merely projection; it is the discovery that certain parts of oneself become legible only in the presence of this particular other. That experience is both wonderful and unsettling—enough, in the maker’s own words, to make one stare at the ceiling.
Visual and symbolic language
The imagery functions as an emotional landscape rather than illustration of a specific couple:
- Mirrors suggest recognition of the self.
- Rain-streaked windows mark the boundary between closeness and reachability.
- Water carries the usual freight of depth, reflection, and emotional flow.
- Colored threads (deep blue, warm amber, soft pink) intertwine without being tied into knots—connection without entanglement or capture.
- The progression ends in black. After all the light and color, the film refuses to answer its own question (“What is the color of love?”). This is a deliberate act of restraint: the experience is left open for the viewer, resisting totalizing definition.
These choices protect the film from becoming a conventional romance narrative. The connection is personal, yet the visuals stay abstract so others can bring their own parallel experiences.
Broader implications
The piece treats a liminal attachment—deep enough to feel like love, yet not meant (or not safe) to become the culturally prescribed form of love. It honors the tenderness of wanting something precious to remain what it is: seen, recognized, and protected from the pressure to name, possess, or transform it. The creative act itself appears as sublimation: a way to approach an experience that is difficult to discuss directly, using music, image, and language without pretending the mystery has been solved.
In short, the film stages the moment when the heart recognizes something the mind has not yet learned how to name, and then chooses to leave the question open rather than force an answer. The black screen is not emptiness; it is the refusal to reduce the experience to a single color or category.