Production notes – Stars in a room, a galaxy on the road – Fragments of music playing in an empty place begin to drift into the city, gradually gathering and becoming a grand piece of music – Insects, schools of fish, birds, tornadoes

Video installation synchronizing ten 85-inch large displays. A reconfiguration of the Audio Visual work that Shinichi Yamamoto has been creating with Tetsuji Ono since 2009.

Created the music video for “Hi-fi,” included on the collaborative EP “Beyond the Binary - EP” by Hoshimiya Toto, who is active on the front lines of internet pop, and SOZEN OSTUBO. Actively employing digital assets such as typography, 3DCG, and PLATEAU, it pursues bold and rich visual expression. In response to the song’s delicate details and dense sound, the colors shift vividly, and the objects reveal a variety of scenes and expressions. From pop, airy chaos, it conveys the space between the virtual and the real.

King Gnu "Nekko" music video A story about a certain doll maker, depicted through animation with a painting-like touch

In order to let the live-action footage evoke the original work’s charming world, we paid close attention to every detail, from the shooting locations to the fabric and fit of the uniforms. I also believe we were able to create a tone for the footage that is rarely seen in television dramas.

Major Awards & Selections Award Winner — Asia Digital Art Award FUKUOKA 2025 Award Winner — Mitaka no Mori Animation Festa 2026, 24th Indies Animation Festa Official Selection – In Competition — SPARK ANIMATION 2026 (Canada / Academy Award®-Qualifying Festival) Official Selection – Music Video Panorama — Turku Animated Film Festival 2026 (Finland) Official Selection — Breath of the City and Forest Film Festival 2026 Official Selection – International Short Film Competition — 2nd Tochigi International Film Festival Official Selection – International Competition — Big Cartoon Festival 2026 (Russia) Competition Nominee — Fukuoka Independent Film Festival 2026 Seed of a Star One day, my daughter casually said the words, “Seed of a Star.” Those simple words quietly planted a seed in me. Drawn to their gentle sound and poetic resonance, I began to imagine stars descending into a silent forest and a landscape inhabited by tiny creatures. The story begins as stars softly fall from the night sky into the forest. When they reach the ground, they become tiny seeds, eventually sprouting and blooming into “star flowers.” The small creatures of the forest gather around them, playing music as they quietly watch over the flowers. Through the light and sounds spreading across the nighttime forest and the gentle passage of time, I wanted to create a world that feels both peaceful and warm. I created the film using Blender, a tool I have worked with for many years. The forest, stars, flowers, and tiny creatures reflect my love of nature and are rendered with a simple, handcrafted feel. By carefully shaping the light, shadow, and textures, I sought to create a landscape that seems to drift somewhere between reality and imagination. Rather than synchronizing the music and images precisely, I wanted them to gently accompany and resonate with one another. The music was composed by cokiyu, a musician with whom I have collaborated on previous works and who has also contributed music to Confessions, directed by Tetsuya Nakashima. For this film, her delicate piano melodies are accompanied by her clear, ethereal voice, perfectly complementing the atmosphere of the nighttime forest. The lyrics carry the themes of the story, with each word resonating quietly, almost as if speaking directly to the viewer. Her voice gently deepens the visual world, enriching its sense of light, time, and the poetic universe of Seed of a Star. I hope that Seed of a Star will quietly take root in the hearts of those who watch it, allowing their own imagination and feelings to gently unfold.

Since the story progresses through narration, we needed to make sure the audience would not get bored. In particular, with short dramas, if viewers lose focus, the work won’t perform well, so at the script stage we asked for more dialogue. We then recorded it at a fast pace and increased the speed by 20% in editing, packing in as much information as possible so there would be no dead air. The script originally started from the idea of “You know how your imagination would always drift during class?” and had a structure in which the protagonist, Kimura, would point out the boss’s verbal slip-up. But it was changed into a structure where Kimura keeps getting carried away after pointing out the mistake, and in the end never manages to actually point it out. As for the wordplay and phrasing, I’m truly grateful for the scriptwriter’s sense of humor and style. My honest reaction the first time I read it was, “Wow, that’s impressive.” For the filming, I had always associated short dramas with an overwhelming number of cuts and a fast pace, but for this project, we wanted to see how much fun we could create through direction and make a new style of short drama. So across the five episodes, we used every gimmick we could, including episodes that played around with text animation in the editing, as well as episodes that experimented with high-speed and slow-shutter techniques. The direction had a basic structure in place, but on the day of shooting we kept adding things and adjusting them on set. Thanks to the cast freely performing, a lot of ideas came to mind, and I’m really grateful for that.

Description: I was responsible for planning and directing the opening video for the game app "Hypnosis Mic -Dream Rap Battle-". Developer: Odd No. Inc. Official website: https://hypnosismic-dreamrapbattle.com

“Scroll Spatial Comic” is a work that uses vertically scrolling manga displayed on a smartphone or tablet as its interface. As you wear a head-mounted display and read through the vertical-scroll manga on your smartphone, a volumetric video that recreates the content of the panel positioned at the center of the screen unfolds before your eyes. As you advance to the next panel, the volumetric video corresponding to that panel appears, and as you move back to the previous panel, it returns to the volumetric video corresponding to that earlier panel. This makes viewers aware that manga contains time and space within each panel, and that the narrative within the manga progresses as the frames known as panels transition in sequence. In this work, manga serves as a medium through which the time and space of volumetric video can be manipulated.

“NEMURUMA EHON” is an original picture book read-aloud program that began streaming on U-NEXT in October 2024. Featuring a carefully selected lineup of Japanese picture books that we want people to read now, chosen together with Nemu Yumemi, the program invites a variety of readers to bring them to life. To convey the appeal of picture books themselves, the actual books are filmed on camera. By making full use of editing techniques such as preserving the sound of pages being turned and action cuts, we aim to transform a single reading experience into video. At the end of the program, “Nemuruma Anime” by Yosuke Omomo continues to play, gently encouraging a calm state of mind and sleep. By exploring what is uniquely possible with streaming video—such as not showing “the next recommended video” and not fixing a set runtime—we aim to create a program that can be a small help in childcare, one that parents can feel comfortable handing to their children on a tablet or smartphone.

We produced a branding movie for IIJ Global Solutions’ brand slogan, “SAIZEN⁺.”