They asked me to make it feel chaotic, and said, “Don’t hold back — if you think it might be too much, that’s exactly right lol,” and I thought, what lovely people. We shot performance cuts of each member in front of a green screen, then added tons of CG to the background and foreground. Since “TRADITIONAL” means tradition, I casually placed CG elements such as ukiyo-e and emojis — forms of culture born in Japan — all over the screen, as if a Showa-era kid were mindlessly sticking stickers all over a wardrobe. When you pack in this much CG and 2D effects and move them around a lot, it gets compressed when uploaded to YouTube and turns into a mess, so we upscaled it to 4K before uploading. Even if you just upscale HD to 4K and upload it, playback in 4K has less compression noise, so I thought it might be best to deliver in 4K whenever possible. When I showed the finished video to the members, they were really happy and said, “What the hell is this!!!!” lol. Even with emojis piled on like this, when Wienners does it, it doesn’t come across as silly. They’re an insanely chaotic pop band, so I think it’s amazing that even in a heavily layered, over-the-top chaotic video, the members don’t get overshadowed. It turned out to be one of my absolute favorite music videos.

Dotsuitarunen “Ice Cream” (MV) It turned out absolutely insanely good. It’s ridiculous. Too cute. This video was made because I wanted Dotsuitarunen, who had fulfilled their dream of major-label debut, to keep shining even more from here on out. Before Dotsuitarunen’s major-label debut, I had made a few videos for them. Back then, Dotsu had a ton of momentum in the indie scene and looked really cool. They even ended up doing a solo show at Akasaka Blitz... way too amazing... But after their major debut, watching their activities from the outside, I could really sense that they were struggling. There were also members leaving the group, and I wondered if they were losing their way. In the middle of that, I received an offer to direct the MV for “Ice Cream,” a track on their first album. It was such a pure song that I suggested making it into footage of just a cute girl walking around, without showing the members at all. The record label people were on board and said, “That sounds great!” I was looking for a transparent, fresh, beautiful girl, and Uyuu-san, the super-beautiful winner of Miss iD 2018, fit my image perfectly. Since Uyuu-san and I had quite an age gap, communication and the distance between us during filming were a little tricky, but when we were chatting after the shoot and I asked, “Do you watch YouTubers and stuff?”, she got into it and said, “I watch them a lot!” and we had a great time talking. If I had started with YouTube talk from the beginning, maybe we could have become closer and brought out even more of Uyuu-san’s cuteness. That’s something I really regret. At first I thought we’d film by the sea, but I felt that the riverbank along a river was more youthful and tear-jerking, so we shot on the banks of the Edo River near Matsudo Station. I think it was nice that the city could be seen in the distance, which gave it a slightly bittersweet feeling. Uyuu-san has transparency, freshness, and overwhelming cuteness, so I think that’s what gives the video its CM-like major-label feel. “This is what it means to be active on a major label, isn’t it?” — this MV is my own answer to that. The illustrator Shinshu Oki, who is close to Dotsu, watched this MV and said, “It’s like you scooped up the diamond-like parts within Dotsu.” I was so happy to hear those words.

The music video for “Koukai,” a track from Satoko Shibata’s Love Holiday The idea of filming Shibata-san’s face in an extreme close-up as she leaned out of a car window hadn’t even been conceived until the day of the shoot. In fact, on the day itself, we were filming scenes of her singing while playing guitar in a park. However, when I asked Shibata-san what image she had for the song, one of the things she mentioned was “an image like riding in a car and feeling the wind,” so we decided to also shoot that cut while traveling by car. And when we actually tried it... it was amazing. So I asked Shibata-san and her manager right then and there, “...Can we just go with this for everything...?” They kindly agreed, so after that we kept shooting car scenes nonstop. Then after the shoot ended and I went home to check the footage we had captured, since I had been filming handheld, the image was shaking all over the place (crying) So I immediately bought a gimbal to reduce camera shake, and we were able to reshoot two days later. When Shibata-san told me she imagined “riding in a car and feeling the wind,” the specific image that came to mind was the refreshingly great scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker escapes in a police car he stole from the police. I decided to film it in that mood, so from the very beginning I shot it as an extreme close-up of her face. Luckily, the weather on the day of the reshoot was incredibly nice. When it came time to do the grading, I aimed for a vivid, light-filled, refreshing feeling. It’s a video where it would not be an exaggeration to say that all you see is her face the whole time, and yet it never feels boring to watch because of Shibata-san’s humor, her cute charm as a woman, and her expressive power—or rather, her sheer humanity. I think this MV was born because Shibata-san herself takes responsibility for her own expression and carries it through to the end.