Hare and Tortoise
Hare and Tortoise is a film that examines the concept of what it means “to win” or “to lose” a race that does not inherently contain the definitions of the concepts of victory and defeat. The film features two squares – red and blue – who race across different locales and settings, but it soon becomes clear that Red Square and Blue Square are visiting different places and doing different things, and begins to raise the question whether Red Square and Blue Square are even part of the same race. After all, how can either square be considered to have “won” the race if they don’t even share the same goals? The film ends with a unknown square silhouetted against the landscape, telling the audience that either of the squares could have “won” the race.
The earliest beginnings of the project – when I was first developing ideas – came while I was jogging. (I am fortunate that jogging was permitted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand.) I noticed that I jogged at a medium speed, in that plenty of people were faster than I was, but there were also runners I could overtake. Whether I was a better runner or not than some other person 50 meters ahead of me on the other side of the street was a question whose answer I could guess. But the concept of “better” comes from a shared metric, such as average speed, top speed, or distance ran before slowing down to a walk, and agreeing such a metric might not be desirable or even possible. Furthermore, my running route was unique, so in any case I never considered myself to have “won” or “lost” against any other runner. The runner I passed could have sprinted earlier, and only slowed down then to catch their breath. They could have also improved a great deal from where they started. Aesop’s fable conventionally considers the slow-moving but diligent tortoise the victor, but in a reality where we do not assign motivation or goals to animals, it is impossible to define a “victor”. Possibly, the hare could have needed that rest, and the race was only a minor concern for him. We view the race between the two as a race of speed, where the tortoise would be victorious, but perhaps we shouldn’t just view the race from that perspective.
The narrative of the film flows relatively naturally from my observations from jogging. The narrative is split into four major parts:
- The beginning of the race between Red Square and Blue Square, where the race appears conventional.
- We follow along with the routes that the Red and Blue Squares take and realize that they are visiting different places and that their paths are starting to diverge.
- We clearly see that they are on separate journeys.
- We are shown a Square finishing, but the identity of that square remains ambiguous.
In terms of the visual component, I originally planned to use Adobe Animate in addition to Photoshop and Premiere Pro, but eventually I abandoned my work in Animate due to the surprising lack of a function to directly export assets into Premiere Pro and its general unwieldiness. As in my radio opera, I used Adobe Audition as my DAW to manipulate the sounds I was working with, adding subtle effects including pitch distortion, reverb, and time manipulation. I used Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop to create the graphics and animations.
I settled on a mixed strategy of utilizing both stop-motion, where Red Square and Blue Square would move frame by frame against a fixed background, and animation, where Red Square and Blue Square would move in smooth motions while the background might be panned, for instance. I also spent significant effort aligning the cuts in the video with the beats and rhythm in the audio to ensure that the graphics would work well with the audio, improving the cohesiveness of the narrative.
This project is the culmination of work associated with Harvard's Music 160r in Fall 2020. I am grateful to Professor Yvette Janine Jackson and Teaching Fellow Sonja Mutic as well as the other members of the seminar for their ideas and feedback. In addition, I must acknowledge my brother Albert who gave me support and advice regarding the usage of the Adobe Suite of applications.