About Bike VS Car

The story began with a small conflict on the road. One evening after work, I noticed a cyclist riding slowly along the edge of the street, while a long line of cars built up behind him. Drivers were forced to cross the white line just to get around, and the whole scene gradually turned tense and impatient. Some even rolled down their windows, gesturing in frustration. In that moment, I realised there was something deeper happening beneath the surface: a quiet contradiction between urgency and restraint, between efficiency and freedom.

I started wondering if this tension could be turned into a visual piece. At first, I imagined a simple cartoon scene: a driver leaning out of his car, angrily shouting, while the cyclist remained calm and unfazed. But it didn’t feel right. It made the cyclist look like the weaker side, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. What I wanted to express wasn’t dominance, but confrontation.

So I changed the idea and made both sides equally angry, shouting at each other. The image became more dynamic, but the focus shifted. It was no longer about whether cars and bicycles should coexist on the road; it had become just another argument between two individuals. And that felt all too familiar, like many real-world situations where the discussion drifts away from the issue itself and gets lost in emotional noise.

So I pushed the idea further. What if I removed the people entirely and let the conflict belong to the objects? A car and a bicycle, arguing over space. The car was easy to imagine, almost like something out of Pixar’s Cars, with the windscreen turning into a pair of angry eyes. But the bicycle felt too fragile, too thin to carry that kind of emotion on its own.

So I merged the rider with the bike, turning them into a single emotional entity. Then I did the same with the car. The scene shifted from people arguing to two forces confronting each other. At one point, I imagined them like two Human Torches, burning and colliding in bright, exaggerated energy. But that felt too vivid, almost too heroic. When I pushed it into black and white, it turned into something closer to Clayface, shapeless, heavy, almost like two masses of mud pressing against each other, too abstract to hold meaning.

In the end, I thought of Felix Dolah. That kind of minimalist abstract expressionism, combined with faint traces of form, creates a subtle sense of emotional pressure. Using black residual strokes to capture the tension between two forces, letting the image sit right at the edge between abstraction and representation, it just felt… right. Almost perfect. The lines couldn’t be too clean either. They needed a bit of roughness, a bit of tension in them, like the way my dog Taro’s fur stands up the moment he senses a challenge. I actually caught myself wanting to tell him this whole story.

By one in the morning, the image still wasn’t perfect, but it was interesting enough to keep.

The problem, however, was that a video couldn’t be that abstract. People wouldn’t understand it. So I brought the story back to reality. This time, I made the cyclist an old man. It felt more believable. People tend to give older individuals a certain level of respect, or at least, they’re less likely to escalate things too far. He appears calm, almost indifferent, shaped by experience. But reality doesn’t always reward calmness. Sometimes, when you don’t react, others push further, especially on the road.

So I asked myself: what if someone actually blocked him? In real life, he would probably just go around. But this is a story. So I took it a step further. I had him kick the car away. I fed that idea into an AI video generator, and somehow, it actually happened. The old man kicked the car. That was the moment I laughed, because some stories don’t need to be perfectly logical. They just need to feel right, or at least be interesting enough to stay with you.