Plan for a short video clip

An animated depiction of individual and collective attention (intended as information design, not as art):

The scene is a large room with a table in the middle. It appears to be night time, the whole thing is filmed in shades of dark gray and black.

A young woman walks into the room, surrounded by two amorphous blobs of illumination, a dim larger one that expands and contracts smoothly and a brighter one that encases her body but flares and darts out in tendrils, sometimes several at once. When the woman walks into the room the brightness initially shoots around the room illuminating various objects, with the dim light seeps behind, gradually filling out the room. She sits at the table.

A young man walks into the room, also encased with two blobs of illumination. His light has a different character. His dim light stays closer to his body and holds a spherical shape. It tends to contract. His bright light moves more slowly and systematically than the woman’s. Where the woman’s brightness moves in abrupt, multiple streams the man’s tends to stay in a single, broader and smoother stream.

When the man sees the woman, his light immediately stops moving about and concentrates entirely on her, leaving his own body entirely.

Shortly after the woman spots the man. Her light extends from herself out toward him and then, following his light, the brightness traces back to herself, so her own body and his body are brightly illuminated with a connecting strand of light. Her dimmer light continues to illuminate the whole room, while his dimmer light contracts around the woman and the table, contracting even further as he sits down with her and begins to talk.

As they talk their lights move together in a sort of dance. Her bright light continues to dart out around around the room, and his follows behind. Sometimes his bright light moves upward, straight overhead, apparently on no object at all. Hers shoots along his line, then darts away, hitting random spots in the room simultaneously, then returning, leaving, weaving. Occasionally their lights converge and move together back and forth, alternating between the man and the woman, then the lights diverge again.

A third person walks up to the table and sets an object on it. The lights center around the object and begin to synchronize until the two brighter lights appear to be a single light with waves moving around its edges and the two dimmer lights blur into a gradation.

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