“Animals have come to mean so much in our lives. We live in a fragmented and disconnected culture. Politics are ugly, religion is struggling, technology is stressful, and the economy is unfortunate. What’s one thing that we have in our lives that we can depend on? A dog or a cat loving us unconditionally, every day, very faithfully.” – Jon Katz

Last year, I watched a singer-songwriter, Ms. Jin A Lee, singing a song composed by herself. It was one of the performances that touched me the most because the way she sang with her soft voice and played piano seemed very expressive. Before the performance, she said that Hachiko (1923~1935), a dog that waited for his deceased owner for little bit more than nine years, was an inspiration for her to compose the song <Follow Your Heart>. From the dog’s devotion, Lee learned that sometimes it is better to wait for the beloved one than to face the reality that he/ she won't come back. I almost cried after watching this performance and started to wonder if I could make an e-poem, with her somber song and part of the film <Hachiko: A Dog’s Story>, to emotionally touch the audience like the way she touched me.

(top) Lee Jin A performing "Follow Your Heart." English subtitles provided below.

This project was the most personally challenging because I went through the hardest time of the semester: I lost all of my data in my laptop, including the document of my ideas for staged e-poem (sigh..). I didn’t really have a lot of time to play around with a lot of ideas and worried about the outcome of this project because not only did I have relatively limited time and resources until I got my laptop back, but also I found tough to find video clips that would work well with Jin A Lee’s song <Follow Your Heart> and the last few minutes of the Hachiko movie. Although it seemed like an interesting and touching theme, I also wanted to make a connection with other videos which were not just about a loyal dog waiting for its owner to come back. Finding a poem was also another hard part. I googled phrases such as “missing someone poem," “dog loyalty poem” but nothing really clicked for me.

After a lot of googling, I finally found quite a few video clips and a poem. For example, videos of a dog cuddling with his owner, a man anxiously waiting for his love, and a Japanese animation <Wolf Children> added details of missing and relishing time with a beloved one. I found a poem called <Forever In Our Heart> on one website. Although it had little bit of religious reference, I thought it would be interesting to combine with the Hachiko film because it was about missing someone who passed away. To adapt the poem for my e-poem, I changed the author’s reference of her family “our” or “us” to “I” and “me” so it is said from Hachiko’s point of view and the title of the poem to <Forever in My Heart>. I also deleted a few sentences of the original poem and substituted them with a few sentences that are more relatable to Hachiko’s context. Because I wanted to focus on influencing the audience’s pathos (emotion) instead of logos (logic), I decided not to include a lot of text and focus more on the harmony of visual and sonic elements. For my revision, I adjusted the size of video clips and re-arranged them a little bit, so they don’t interfere and cut Hachiko’s head off. I also played with opacity, to decrease the contrast between the dark main background and sub-screens.

This is the draft of the e-poem:




Here is the revision:

Begin this path

1. Teaching With Sound

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