Animating the hare
Five seconds that close exactly on themselves, for twenty cents. And what the measurements couldn't see.
· 5 minA loop, not a short video
The mechanical hare is the project's character. It had been sitting still on this site's front page from the start. Making it breathe required one precise thing: the last frame had to rejoin the first well enough that the seam never shows.
That's what separates a loop from a short video. A short video stops. A loop has no visible end.
Twenty cents, and an image we already had
The animation starts from the character's own image, the one already on the page. A model receives that image at BOTH ends — start and finish — and has to invent what happens in between. That's what forces the loop to close.
The render costs twenty cents. It comes back at 24 frames per second and runs 5.17 s; a second pass brings it to exactly 150 frames at 30 fps, interpolating rather than duplicating. The stated duration is then the real one.
What gets measured, and what gets looked at
The seam is measurable: compare how much the last frame resembles the first against how much two ordinary neighbouring frames resemble each other. If the seam is as good as a normal frame step, the eye won't catch it. Here it's better.
Except a second render scored BETTER than the one we kept. It was still worse: the frame crept forward while the lamp brightened, and the ears left the shot. A loop that pushes the frame and brings it back closes perfectly — the number says nothing about what happened in between.
That's the lesson relearned every time. Measurement eliminates; it doesn't choose.
Three destinations, three files
The preservation file is never published: sixteen megabytes for five seconds, with no compression at all. Everything else comes down from it.
The front page gets 231 KB. YouTube gets a more generous file, since it will re-encode on top: sending it the website version would add a generation of loss for nothing. The vertical networks get a 9:16 crop — not black bars, which shrink the subject without showing anything more.
And each one needs a silent audio track. A video with no audio stream at all travels badly through these platforms' processing.
Where to watch it
The loop runs on this site's front page, on YouTube as a Short — a Short replays on loop, which an ordinary five-second video does not — and as a Reel on Facebook and Instagram.
The AI does the set. The rabbit plays.