The world grows most quiet during the Blue Hour, that sliver of time right before night. So short as to almost not have existed. During the Blue Hour, babies stop crying. So mothers gaze out their windows. Candles burn a bit dimmer. The Blue Hour is the world heaving one last sigh before going to sleep. I’ve always maintained that poets write from the Blue Hour of their brains.
I look for the Blue Hour in every movie. It’s in Moonlight. When Chiron’s staring into the ocean, it goes, “In the moonlight, black boys look blue.” It’s in The Act of Killing, a documentary about Indonesian genocide. I don’t think there’s a word in the English language to describe the action of sharply taking in a breath, out of breathlessness. The kind of breath that moves you into an almost-cry. It’s not a gasp. But whatever you call it, that’s what I did when I saw that blue picture. All the night birds taking flight. It’s in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. I’ve inserted a picture below:
It’s in Babel. I’ll never forget those two boys laughing against the wind on the mountain, before they knew their lives were over. The sound cut out with all the blue. Like the blue was in your head. In their heads. I noticed that Past Lives did the same thing with its own Blue Hour shot. Cut out all the sound. The Blue Hour is Eternal. It is quiet. It is sad. Profoundly so. I exist in the Blue Hour in the cave of my head and the trench of my heart. It’s the best time to smoke a cigarette. Hence my assignment. I wanted to capture the spirit:
https://editor.p5js.org/EloraTrotter/sketches/GX1kLdNr6
You can take a look at the code above. I’m very glad that I was able to implement loops, classes, and constructors. I wanted to increase the frame rate but P5Js kept crashing. With help from Professor Riad and the ever-reliable Coding Train (Youtube video linked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcdigVaIYAk), I was able to fully understand what I was writing. I tried tweaking the the particles so that they became different sizes, or less opaque, but I scrapped all that in the end. Simplicity suited this piece, just like simplicity suits the Blue Hour. I would like to continue working on this piece because I have an unfinished vision of the smoke being huge Van Gogh-like swirls. But that’s a task for future Elora. Carpe the noctem. You learn.
Also- you know on second thought. I’d also like to learn how to integrate music and coding. One song that captures Blue Hour for me is “Midnight Blues” by Pavel Milyakov (Bryan Waterman rec). I’d like people to listen to that while viewing this.