Panic

The goal of Panic was to portray the internal reality of a character experiencing a panic attack. In order to convey the symptoms and sensations the character endures, we explored elements of visual metaphor, movement, and color. 

To represent a panic attack, we decided on three distinct acts to represent a panic attack before, during, and after. The viewer can gain a sense of what exists in reality without Xenia's anxiety, in order to truly understand the visual representation of her fears in her panic reality.

Xenia's perception of reality is an over-exaggeration of her feelings and thoughts within her internal world and is not “true” to the external reality in which she exists. The panic attack arises from Xenia’s anxiety warping her experience and reality. She loses control over her mind and surroundings as the sensations she feels become her reality. 

According to the national library of Medicine, “panic disorder is more common in women than men. It usually starts when people are young adults. Sometimes it starts when a person is under a lot of stress.” With this in mind, Xenia was created as a young woman who works in a very stressful job that is both socially and physically demanding. Her clothing was designed to represent a lotus, one of the visual symbols throughout the film. 

Ren is a representation of the people that may never experience a panic attack but is capable of sympathizing with her distress. 

“Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.”

― Honoré de Balzac

Mr. Davis is a manifestation and metaphor for Xenia’s fear. It was intentional that he does nothing other than be undesirably familiar with Xenia to cause her fear. The fear that leads up to or happens within panic attacks is often the fear of anticipation for something that never happens. Therefore, Davis was meant to exist but not continue to enact the fear completely. The fear becomes fear itself. 

For Xenia and Ren’s colors, we chose mostly neutral lighter tones in order to stand out against the bright colors of the panic reality and external world. 

The main color palette used in Panic consists of blue, purple, and pink. Often a color palette used in cyberpunk artwork, this palette is exciting, fun, and wild, which is intentional to contrast the fear and anxiety that permeated the internal reality of the character. Their experience should normally be fun and exciting but instead is full of anxiety.  

The lotus is used here as a metaphorical representation of the metamorphosis Xenia endures as she faces the symptomatic fear of death and emerges from her panic attack with a newfound sense of peace. 

The seedpod is a representation of her fear as a metaphor for trypophobia, a phobia of many holes clustered together. As a lotus seedpod withers and dies it becomes more grotesque, but eventually, a new lotus emerges from the soil below, and the cycle begins anew.