STOP LOOKING: an Alan Watts chase film about the seeker who is the sought

Stop hunting the one who is looking. The hunt is the whole problem, because the
thing you are searching for is the one doing the searching.

STOP LOOKING is Song 13 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from
the Alan Watts lectures, and it is the chase film. The eye cannot catch the eye
behind the scan, so the search keeps stuttering and restarting, until it finally
stops, and the relief of stopping is the thing you were looking for.

Watts told it as a comedy

A thief robs a house. The police come in below. He runs upstairs, they follow, he
climbs higher and higher until he is out on the roof with nowhere left to go. That
is the ego trying to escape itself. You feel like the lower self, the moralists
chase you, so the ego climbs and announces that it has a higher self. But the higher
self is the lower self in a better hat. There is no top floor. There is no door. The
only way out of the chase is to stop running.

So I built the film to actually chase, then to stop. It runs hard for two minutes,
then drops into a dead-still heartbeat, and the thing the bunny was frantically
hunting turns out to have been right there the whole time.

A chase from the first bar

This was a complete rebuild of the deluxe cut, in the same pass across the series
as This Is It. This one is a chase, so it got the
energetic version of the treatment. The bed now starts with energy from
the very first bar instead of idling, the intro is filled with a fast hook, and the
camera and the bunny do a lot more.

A toccata that runs

The music is an original ChipForge composition that translates Bach's Toccata in D
minor, the famous one, into a D-Phrygian restless EDM. A harpsichord states the
toccata theme, which is the instrument that figure lives on, a clavinet runs the
restless sixteenth-note chase underneath, a string section drives the drama, brass
stabs punch the chord turns, and a marimba carries the comedy when the thief climbs
the floors. The bespoke device is the tape-stop. Every few bars the whole motion
reverses and stutters to a halt, the search jamming up. And the bespoke centerpiece
is the stillness, where everything drops to a single heartbeat sub at about sixty
beats a minute, the chase stops, and the figure finally resolves home on the tonic.

The thing you were hunting was here

The picture keeps the restless slate-blue look but does more with it. The camera
shakes and whips on the chase, hard-shoves sideways on every tape-stop, locks dead
still in the stillness, and settles warm on the resolve. The bunny pats its pockets,
spins, peers behind its own shoulder, snatches at empty air, whips around at the
thing that is always behind it. The bridge draws a house in cross-section with the
thief in gold and the police in blue climbing to the roof. And then everything
stops, and a People of the Stars constellation comes out of the dark. That is the
thing it was hunting, here the whole time. The resolve warms to gold, the bunny
dusts off its empty paws, and walks on.

Made on a laptop

Stick figure simple in Python and PIL, a spit-rap and spoken narration by Der
Gouverneur, the Plan 9 Glenda bunny as the thing you can never catch, a ChipForge
Bach-toccata EDM score, a hand-built chase SFX stem. Generated locally. No GPU, no
subscriptions, no stock footage. Written, directed, composed, animated, voiced, and
produced by Joshua Ayson with AI, for Organic Arts LLC.

Watch it here: STOP LOOKING on YouTube.

More from Napkin Films

• This Is It, Song 12: you're it, already.
• One Hand, Song 11: the koan that breaks the answer-machine.