Where Friends Meet

Blaine Bacchiocchi

Interview by L. Valena

March 22, 2022

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

I received a video. It looked like someone's backyard, or a park. A wooded area. The camera was focused on a tree with a sign that said 'Friends', and kind of gave me tavern sign vibes. The video was a timelapse of the events of the tree, which seemed to be a meeting place for birds. They would show up, hang out, and leave. What I kept coming back to was the phrase ‘where friends meet’. So that idea just stuck in my brain and played on a loop. Recently, I've gotten into Dungeons and Dragons with some of my teacher friends, and we had just done a campaign for one of our players' bachelorette parties, so we went to a tavern and played tavern games. So that was also something on my mind.

I brought my sketchbook to a local dive bar one night, and that phrase kept playing in my head. I was in a place where friends meet. And as I was sitting there, it just kept getting louder and more full of people as time passed. The prompt was a timelapse, and I'm not too familiar with working in video, but I feel like this deserved an animation. I had some basic, (mostly greyscale) markers with me, and thought, "what if I just write the phrase out, over and over again?" So that's what I did. I wrote the phrase over and over again. I started with the lowest grey and took a picture. And then I thought, "what if I do this with every marker that I have?" And what it created was this sense of filling up, this sense of people coming in and things getting louder. Maybe more chaotic.

Sometimes I feel really out of place in situations like that. My social anxiety gets a little piqued. But I still stay there, because every once in a while I meet a friend in that environment, and it's good for me to not stay in the house all the time. So I started layering with different markers, different colors and sizes of markers, and photographing them. I didn't really care if they were perfect photographs, or well lit. I was in a particular environment, and I was kind of capturing that environment.

I was still stuck on the phrase, and maybe we can't really see what the phrase is, so then I animated spelling out the phrase. Then I just started putting them all together in Procreate. I animated them in chunks, and then put them into a basic video editor to put it all together. Then I felt like it needed sound. Because it was giving me that chaotic anxiety thing just with the basic image that was being created. The software had a bunch of basic sounds, so I tried putting in a crowd sound. Then I thought, what other things happen in environments like that? What would someone like me focus on? Someone coughing. Someone's phone going off. Maybe there are flies trapped in the bar. All of these sounds could end up there. And then, just for shits and giggles, I found a gun cocking sound and people screaming. I thought it also kind of fit. [Laughs]

Yeah that got dark real quick.

It was very organic. I'm not about to go shoot up a place, but you never know, that does happen. And then the heartbeat that I put in there was building tension, and I figured I had to break the tension somehow. If you were somebody that was about to do something horrible, you're gonna be nervous. You're probably going to be hyper-sensitive to sounds like this, because you know that you're about to do something terrible.

It's really interesting to hear you talk about that. Is the heartbeat meant to be from the perspective of the person about to do the violent act?

Not necessarily. The heartbeat was in there first. Initially, it was just anxiety, being overwhelmed, and feeling like you can't quite stay in that state any longer. Even though it's where friends meet, you should be feeling a sense of community, calm, and comfort. And maybe this is pandemic brain, too. I've always been anxious in social situations. With the pandemic, I think it's gotten a little worse, or at least come to the surface as something I recognize more in myself and try to push past the scariness. Sometimes I try to go out and just stop myself. I think that's where the heartbeat started. I was trying to portray this sense of being overwhelmed in a situation that keeps getting more filled and chaotic.

It almost felt like it was cycling through all of the possible things that could happen in a social environment. All of the dangers that are there in a crowd.

The city that I was in, New Bedford, doesn't have the greatest reputation. Occasionally people get shot in New Bedford. The crime rate has gone down, but it does have a reputation. And when I lived there, a couple of streets away someone got murdered one night. All those things are possibilities when you go out. The scariness for me isn't what could happen physically, because I've never been threatened like that. But that could be part of someone's social anxiety, even if they're not mine.

I do think that the pandemic has brought a lot of those things to the surface. What we're supposed to feel in a given situation, and when we have those moments where our actual reactions don't match up.

I shouldn't feel this worried, but I am for whatever reason.

When the pandemic started, that anxiety came on so fast. Suddenly, it was like I didn't trust anybody. I'd see strangers on the street and be terrified of them.

And this whole time, I was still working. I was not of the lucky few who got to do their job from home all the time. I was on a hybrid schedule, so I got to do Wednesdays at home. But every other day I was at school. I was still commuting, and doing the thing. So my perception is a little different. I was still doing all the normal things, but then I didn't have any other options outside of that. No outlet. I didn't have an option to go hang out with people. Zoom meetings were for class, school, work. I didn't want to do that for my socialization also. It didn't feel right.

It's crazy how it really was like zoom or nothing. It really was kind of a tough choice sometimes. Did you like the experience of working with video? Did you say this was your first time with video?

Sort of. I did some basic stop motion stuff when I was in school because art teacher school makes you do all sorts of stuff. It was never something that would have been the first choice for me. I'm not if I'll continue with it, but it felt right for this project. I like to choose the medium for the project, and because I had received a video for a prompt, this felt right. I'm not an animator, just using basic knowledge here. I feel like that works. I was uncomfortable with the medium, making a piece about anxiety.

Do you have any advice for another creative person approaching this project for the first time?

This is my third time doing this. I think my most useful advice is to not overthink it. Go with your first instinct, because it's probably going to lead you down the correct path, especially because of the timeframe. Two weeks? You can't overthink that. And that's good for me because what stops me a lot of times from even starting a project is my brain overthinking everything, and then thinking itself out of it. That's kind of halted my creativity for a few years now.

I reached out to you guys because I needed something, I didn't know what it was, but I needed something. I knew taking on a project like this was going to force me to do the thing that I felt stalled in. I don't have the space to create anything huge and messy like I did for the previous two projects. When I did the earlier two I had a studio space I could just futz around in. I didn't have that this time, so I just used my ipad, my sketchbook, and my cellphone. And I think that's also a lesson. You don't have to have all of the things that you would want to have for your creative space to do something creative. Limits can be freeing. Do the thing you're afraid to do.

Call Number: Y71FI | Y77FI.baWhe

Blaine Bacchiocchi is a Fine Artist and Art Educator. She holds a Masters of Education and resides in Buzzard’s Bay Massachusetts. Blaine has a life-long love of creative endeavors and enjoys working in a range of media. She teaches High School Art in Cape Cod.