Hebe Tien – One, after Another

The story in Hebe Tien’s song “One, after Another” describes the so-called little people in Taiwanese society who do their best every day to survive, but still fall into despair. The video is based on the idea of a historical zoetrope, a drum-shaped optical device for mechanically creating moving images, and uses the persistence of vision to create the illusion of movement as the phantom box spins faster and faster. Several floors show people and how they go about their daily lives, from a mother cleaning and comforting her crying child, to an office worker literally driven into a hamster wheel by his boss, to an exhausted construction worker on the street. Everyone looks rushed until the picture comes to a halt and the singer, who has been watching their activities from the outside, has a kind of afflatus and the overall mood lightens. Suddenly all the people turn their lives around as they have changed their minds and attitudes. Through the original image of the zoetrope and with the help of real-life situations from Taiwan, the message is thus conveyed that everyone can become a happy person.