Director’s Statement

“The Bike” is about the process of memory expressed through material manipulation and a nonlinear narrative. The film was inspired by a personal memory of buying a bike as a young girl. I remember wanting to get a black bike that was meant for boys, and settling for a pink one that my parents thought was more appropriate. This contradiction is what initially inspired the film.

However, after making the film I asked my parents about my bike, they told me that it was black. This showed how unreliable the process of memory was. It also connected to the idea of gender as internal and external realities, in which the internal becomes the external.

Leading up this film, I experimented with drawings in which I created oil paint transfers, tracing paper animations, films exploring simulacra and ideas of representation, and installation. These projects led to me thinking about layers, accumulation, and space. These techniques and ideas culminated in the making of “The Bike,” and how these ideas were related to the process of memory.

When I tell the story about buying the bike, I see the personal contradictions that continue to shape my sense of self and how I interact with the world. Its disjunctive, almost violent nature is tied to the way I remember things and to my experiences as a queer person.

The dissociation between the character and the space, individual shots, and ultimately the viewer is similar to the tension I feel between an internal identity and my physical reality. In a way, this character is an embodiment of myself because the way I deal with that tension is to rebel against it.

Watching the film and seeing its images are uncomfortable to me, which is why I chose to make it; to face that tension head-on, and find meaning in its contradictions. I hope that this film can do the same for you. The question that came up for me during the film was “How do I tell a story when most of it is forgotten?” Rather than attempt the impossible task of trying to reconstruct details exactly as they existed inreality, I created the film in the way I tell stories: piecing together disjunctive images and reframing them into a narrative.

This process of recalling guided the structure of the film, which hyper-focuses on images of the bike and of phallic movements, and switches between abstraction and narrative. The boundaries between real and imagined, present and past are unclear. Thus, I made the decision to use stock images for the bike because it took the bike from a specific to a universal context.

I realized that many of the details of a memory are forgotten over time, so when we try to recall the objects, people, and places from that memory we are actually replacing them with representations of an image. In that way, memories are made up of simulacra. When I tried to recall the experience of buying the bike, what I most clearly remembered was the color pink. Thus, the bike is represented as a stock photo of a pink bike because its reality as an object became subsumed by the color I remember.

The idea of unreliable memory helped me conceptualize the intro and ending sequences. I think of the two sequences as an imperfect loop. Both form a grid, the vague sense of connection between the two sequences points to the fact that it is impossible to ever remember the event exactly as it happened.

Instead, my present experiences modify the past, changing the way I perceive those events. In that way, “The Bike” portrays memory as an accumulative process. The film was a huge learning process for me materially. The challenges were well worth it, however, as my experimentation with the materials were key to developing the concept for the film.

I ended up using a combination of cutouts of stock images, ink drawings on tracing paper, string, and charcoal drawings that I integrated through layering and a glass multiplane. The multiplane allowed me to accumulate layers of material and play with dramatic shifts in depth and visual clarity, creating the illusion of 3D space. The most difficult parts of the process were figuring out how to make the materials work together.

In the scene with the girl riding her bike, I was animating tracing paper over a cutout bike puppet, which was on top of a charcoal background that I panned by hand. I first created the drawn animation on tracing paper, bike puppet with moving wheels, tassels and leg from stock images, and a long strip of background using charcoal.

I cut a slit into the leg area of each drawing. In order to animate it, I had to thread it through the slit in each frame. I layered the drawing 17 frames at a time, which is how long it took for the body’s pendulum motion to reach each extreme. I relayer at the extremes of every thrust that her body makes, making it more violent and jarring.

Each time I added a frame, I would remove the leg then thread it back through each slit. Thus, for each frame, I had to do three movements: drag the background, move the bike tassels, rotate the bike wheels, remove the leg, add a drawing frame, rethread the entire leg through multiple drawings, then animate the circular motion of the leg. It took me about 15 minutes to complete each frame.

The drawn animation in the film was done using ink on tracing paper. In most scenes I layer the tracing paper over the cutouts and the charcoal backgrounds, either directly or on a glass multiplane. There were multiple reasons why I chose to use tracing paper. The opacity of the paper allowed me to partially obscure the images below, making them seem distant and unclear.

Another reason is that by layering the paper for a certain number of frames, removing them, then restarting the layering process, the image would flash and pulsate. I used this technique strategically in scenes such as the walking scene, where I started relayering every time the character made contact after a step.

I also used this technique in the scene where she flips coins onto the table. In that scene, a huge challenge for me was figuring out how the materials worked together spatially though the use of the multiplane. The right and left hands were animated over different levels of the multiplane to create the illusion of the left hand being much closer and clearer to the viewer.

The stock image cutouts of coins are animated directly on top of the tracing paper. As the left hand flips, the cutouts change layers so that they are below the tracing paper. The coins are also cut out in perspective.

Finally, I create a dramatic change in depth when the hand slams down on the table by changing levels on the multiplane during the movement. In all three scenes, the tracing paper allowed ghost images of previous frames to show, emphasizing the relationship between past and present and the process of memory. The combination of using tracing paper and the multiplane allowed me to manipulate visual clarity and depth throughout the film. The use of clarity, depth, movement, sound, and images are intended to feel jarring and disjunctive.

Ultimately, the material techniques I developed allow me to snap the viewer in and out of dissociation.