A creepy society ruled by the god called the internet and the angel called the smartphone

Inspired by the title “The Last Man in Europe,” one of the other proposed titles for George Orwell’s science fiction novel 1984, I created a story about a protagonist being swallowed up by internet society. For the world-building, I drew influence not only from 1984 but also from PSYCHO-PASS and Discipline and Punish. I tried to portray contemporary society as a sacred yet eerie world permeated by gods, likening the internet itself, or the “sense of common decency” fostered there, to God as an omnipresent watcher, and smartphones, as internet devices, to angels as God’s messengers. The protagonist, an existence before being exposed to God’s surveillance—that is, before internalizing the watcher—is modeled on the devil, the symbol of chaos and the antithesis of angels. I personally like the atmosphere in which mischief and a sense of tragedy coexist, so the overall design ended up having a cute quality. Since the comic panel layout was a familiar structure for depicting the story, I organized the sequence of information toward the climax and carefully examined the role and function of each cut.

By treating long-lasting “artificial flowers” as the “works” left behind by people who make their living through creation, I linked them with “bones,” the material that remains in the human body the longest. I hoped to evoke the fragility that becomes all the more striking precisely because she is a virtual singer, a figure that is so prominent in the present moment, as well as the emptiness of basing the motif on “bones” while she herself, as data, has none.

Using disc unfolding and long one-take camera work, I treated the entire song as a small narrative. I also built the typography from motion design to match the song’s sense of floating, and scattered little “what happens next?” elements throughout. The piece was created with the intention of delivering a viewing experience in which, even though the song runs for a relatively long 5 minutes and 30 seconds, you end up thinking, “I was just staring at the screen, and the song was already over.”