You are sitting in your everyday chair, doing your everyday chores. Nothing is different, nothing has changed. And suddenly, everything has. Your breath shortens. Your heart begins racing. Your chest tightens in a way that feels irreversible. You are certain – more certain than you have ever been – that this is the end. That is the private violence of a panic attack, and that is the territory Martin Schmidt enters with short film Lines.The challenge here is not narrative but sensation, because how do you represent something that feels catastrophic yet leaves no visible trace? Schmidt chooses reduction and abstraction instead of explanation, and builds his film around two colors that push against each other as if survival itself depended on occupying space. There are no characters in the conventional sense, no rooms, and no backstory – only vibrating fields of color that behave like bodies under threat.Lines strips everything down to its core. Two colors. Two forces. Fighting to remain. Fighting for their lives.“I built the film in Autodesk Maya using a custom rig designed to control the specific “nervousness” of the borderlines.” – Schmidt discussing his production.The director said that “The core inspiration is deeply personal: my own experience with panic attacks and chronic tension. I wanted to visualize the visceral feeling of an inner world that is constantly vibrating and fighting for space.” That intention is felt in every frame, because the shapes pulse with every note and resist collapse, while the screen becomes a compressed chamber where pressure accumulates without relief. The sensation of suffocation and loss of control – the impression of being trapped inside your own ribcage – is translated into movement that feels alarmingly precise.Schmidt draws from the ‘Absolute Film’ tradition of the 1920s, and the echoes of Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren are unmistakable. Yet he pulls that disciplined geometric language into the present, infusing it with a volatility that feels inseparable from the overstimulated rhythm of modern life. And, much like in those early experimental works, nothing in Lines is automated. The movement is not driven by audio-reactive software but hand-animated frame by frame, with Schmidt building a custom rig to control the specific nervousness of the borderlines and locking the animation into the delightful sound design with microscopic precision. The result may appear minimal, but unlike a real panic attack, here each tremor is calibrated, each collision intentional.“It was symbiotic “ping-pong” process between myself and the sound team. We constantly rearranged the edit to make the audio and visuals lock in” – Schmidt explains how he worked with his sound departmentBeyond the personal, he hopes the film resonates politically, suggesting that in a polarized world where opposing sides are constantly crushing each other, the element that stops fighting and begins dissolving boundaries can paradoxically become the strongest. That idea quietly unfolds in the film’s progression, where resistance gives way to transformation rather than annihilation.At its core, Lines is not about explaining panic attacks but about placing you inside one, stripping away narrative comfort until only sensation remains. In doing so, it achieves something rare, which is making abstraction feel intimate. Watching it does not feel like observing a concept but like enduring an episode, where control slips and the body takes over. And like in the real world, it ends without spectacle – only a loosening. You emerge not with answers but with recognition: a reminder that what feels unspeakable can still be drawn, still be shared, and, in that sharing, perhaps softened.