Sheep, called by humans, cross over a fence. Among them, only one flees. It tries to break suddenly away from an ordinary, habitual ritual, yet unless humans shear its wool, a sheep’s wool will continue to grow forever. While this evokes the arrogance and cruelty of human breeding practices, the sheep’s way of life also, in a sense, resonates with something within human beings. Might we, too, be tormenting ourselves?

I am currently producing a work tentatively titled “A,” and this piece was created as a prelude and foreshadowing for it. Within a short runtime of about 10 seconds, it is filled to the brim with elegant motions evoked by the music. Unlike my usual self-initiated works, this piece and the next one (“A”) aim primarily to express, as purely and directly as possible, the simple emotions that the music calls to mind, setting aside detailed intentions and lines of thought. As a result, while introducing vivid colors with bright yellow-green as the main tone—something I had tended to avoid until now—the rest is largely kept in monochrome, emphasizing that one color even more strongly. Although it is a modern motion graphic grounded in a flat, pop-oriented style, I made heavy use of post-processing such as color shifts and noise, pursuing rich textural expression and aiming for a gap that leaves even this fleeting runtime feeling somehow warm. Around the 3-second mark, I attempted an illusion-like expression in which an X (the bowling strike symbol) encountered after passing through a tunnel transitions into a three-dimensional rotation. Incidentally, in my self-initiated work “Glancent,” released last February, I also created a similar connection in the latter half, where 2D graphics seamlessly transitioned into a three-dimensional structure. Since these kinds of “illusion” effects are not often seen in the realm of 2D shape motion, I would like to actively devise more of them going forward. Now that commercials and visual works making heavy use of motion graphics interwoven with text, images, and video—while incorporating short-form shape motion—have increased dramatically compared with a while ago, is there still room for what pure【shape-only】 or【2D-only】 motion can do? At a time when creators are becoming saturated and are also being threatened by the presence of AI, what more can I do as someone who continues to pursue handmade shape motion in the most literal sense? I want to explore the potential of a short, one-shot shape motion that can be seen as a return to origins. In the end credits, the conventional 【Music】 credit becomes 【つかったおんがく】, and 【Video】 becomes 【今見とる映像を作った人】, flexibly departing even from the format I had maintained as a template up to now, and suggesting prospects for a new style of work in the future.

Description: A single light flickers, and a melody echoes as if splitting the silence. This is a visual world built from SARM’s own mystical experiences since childhood. Using contemporary visual techniques, it brings to life fantastical visions hidden deep within memory. Direction using VFX and AI traces the boundary between dream and reality, drawing the viewer into another dimension. Light and shadow, silhouettes glimpsed between blinks, and a voice that reverberates throughout. All of it resonates with the energy of the song, creating a cosmic expanse. The interplay of monochrome and vivid color sears itself into our minds, as if fragments of memory were being illuminated by light. This work presents SARM’s inner experiences, sublimated through the fusion of music and image, as a visible spiritual world. Please keep in your heart the story of memories told by light, and the path it leaves behind.

Depicting the dawn of their hard-won debut, the composition shows how gathering firefly squid becomes a single great light, bringing the night to an end.

CITIZEN’s design philosophy film, created to commemorate the company’s 100th anniversary. In a time when attitudes toward “what a watch should be” and “how we engage with time” are undergoing significant change, we conducted interviews with 25 members of CITIZEN’s Design Department about their thoughts on “making watches,” and produced this film based on those recordings. The audio data will be preserved as an in-house archive at CITIZEN Watch for the next 100 years. This film was created to convey to as many people as possible the meaning of making watches, which is the core of the company’s business, as well as the passion behind watchmaking for CITIZEN’s future.

I chose to create a visual effect where the girl’s drawings of illustrations expand into the singing scene as well.