This is a vision movie for Daito Seiki Co., Ltd. Manufacturing is often seen as repetitive and dangerous work, but it should be fundamentally free and creative. Through 2D animation, we expressed our wish that everyone involved in manufacturing could work more creatively and enjoyably, and experience many moments of excitement and inspiration in manufacturing environments that feel like playgrounds filled with ideas and wonder. Our image character, “Bandosou-kun,” is also running around freely throughout the film.

A music video commemorating the 10th anniversary of Assassination Classroom. We created it in a reverse-flow style, assembling collaborations with various artists into one edit. It became a work like a motion-design festival.

I directed the music video for Lucky Kilimanjaro's “Mugensa.”

Original character "AKUMU-KUN," newly drawn by manga artist/illustrator Posuka Demizu, races freely through a virtual space as if embodying the lyrics of the song.

Responsible for producing the interactive content for the video exhibition at Ecoru Togoshi, the environmental learning and exchange facility run by Shinagawa City. < Balance Planet > An interactive video content piece that lets visitors learn about the environment while experiencing it with a balance band worn on the arm. < Creature Touch > An interactive content piece where visitors can touch illustrations of creatures that live in the sea and on land to play and interact.

I created a visualizer in which two air dancers appear to be friends.

ICQ - I directed/produced the music video for “On My Way.”

This is the MV for Akiyama Kiiro, a male solo musician, and it had been a while since I’d done a boys’ MV, so I wondered if I’d be okay—but in terms of the song style and the content, I really felt it matched me perfectly. When I first got an email asking if they could put me forward as a director candidate, I still only knew the song title, but just seeing the word “Sonic Move” made me imagine almost exactly what the current concept would be. So I was like, “Please let me do this!” For lighting, it was Hirai from Office Doing, who I’ve worked with for a long time. Hirai is honestly such a great person, absolutely the best. He’s helped me so much since the days when I didn’t know left from right, and I’m always insanely grateful. And for the camera, I did it myself. There’s the saying “use a specialist for each job,” so part of me always wants to leave shooting to a cinematographer, but with green-screen work, it’s not an ordinary shoot, so if you don’t shoot with editing in mind, it’s basically meaningless. Lately I’ve also been vaguely thinking it might actually be faster to do it myself, so this time I shot it myself. There was only one subject, and I wasn’t planning to do any camera movement anyway. Still, I really want to get over this whole “I want to do everything myself” thing... I rented an FX6 because I wanted to try it, but it was so ridiculously pro-level that I had no idea how to use it and it was difficult, and with my level of understanding there was no way I wouldn’t totally bomb the shoot, so I didn’t even bring it. In the end I shot with my usual a7s3, and honestly it’s the best—easy to use, beautifully clean footage, absolute strongest. Love it. I recorded in ALL-Intra. Compared with H.265, editing is like ten times lighter, and when I was editing an MV shot in H.265 before, the accumulated edits toward the end made it so heavy that AE stopped working and I couldn’t even render it, which was way too dangerous, so ALL-Intra is definitely the way to go. With ALL-Intra, even if the edit gets heavy toward the end, it barely holds up. You need V90 SD cards and the files are big, but well, that’s a tiny trade-off. You can always convert only the parts you need to ProRes, but I end up doing all kinds of things all the way through anyway. So I shot a bunch of things, even rented a stunt bike for the motorcycle scenes, and wrapped the shoot smoothly. For offline editing, I had director Kotaro Saito, whom I often ask, do it, and although he polished it into a nice shape, editing with only green-screen material and no clues in the background is still hard, isn’t it... sorry... So from there I tweaked it a lot, big and small, to match my own tempo and sense of timing, and it was fun. For the CG too, the background for the motorcycle scene was made by a creator named Ai Ikeda, and it was amazing. The other scenes—the game center and the cityscape—were made by me. But you know, unlike the idol groups I usually work with, there’s only one person, so it’s just so much easier. Having that kind of freedom to make it interesting is the best. I could have done camera movement and tracking to get that realistic coolness, but since the subject was just one person, I decided to shoot it fixed and then do the camera work in CG afterward. From an editing standpoint too, this was overwhelmingly faster. Removing tracking markers takes several steps, and tracking itself takes time. With a short deadline, I didn’t want to spend time on that. If you think about shots where camera movement really matters, honestly up to around a trio, fixed shots might be fine. Well, it depends on the deadline. Anyway, since this time too the deadline was one of those classic major-label-short-turnaround situations, I shot with a shot list and system that anticipated the later editing schedule. In the end, I barely used any footage with actual camera movement, and almost everything was shot fixed and then moved afterward. By the way, from shooting to deadline it was less than 20 days, so for me it was cutting it pretty close. Since there was no time, I was making a bunch of things in parallel, and I didn’t have time to refine this and that, so I kept spreading out predictions—using instinct and experience to anticipate “if I do this, it’ll probably turn out like that”—and I made it with almost no detailed checking until the end. Still, I’m glad I was able to really push it right up to the very last moment. It’s really great work when making it is fun. Thank you very much. But in the end, the best part was that before making this, I had bought and studied a course on coloso by director/VFX artist Reo Wakui, and that was seriously, insanely useful. I’d been making green-screen videos for ages, and I was like, “Wait, I had no idea how to pull greens or handle masks at all this whole time!?” Thanks to that course, keying became much easier all at once, and as a result, even with color work—which I’d always been bad at—I’m not good yet at all, but I got to the point where it feels like if I study a bit more, I might actually be able to do it well. Things like linear workflows and ACES are apparently standard now, and I really would never have known that if I hadn’t bought this course, so I’m glad I studied... Also, I really think if I understand lighting and color correction, I’ll be the strongest. I’ve gotten this far just working alone by instinct with no knowledge at all, so if I study, I’d be way too powerful, right? My potential is insane. I also want to understand CG. I seriously don’t get it. I’m always making things by feel, just feeling my way through... Oh, and after this was released, I was ego-searching and found out that the drummer on this track was Hiroshi Kido, someone I’d met a few times in Kyoto when I was around 20. We were almost the same age, and back then I was also in a band and pretending to be a drummer, but Hiroshi suddenly appeared in the local live-house scene around that time as an absolutely incredible drummer. I thought, wow, amazing—and soon after, he became the drummer for Kenichi Asai’s band and turned pro. As for me, I kept smoldering away for several years, living a trashy life, the band broke up, I quit music, and now I’m where I am today through video work, which I started as a hobby. I doubt he remembers me, but it was nostalgic and somehow made me happy. So this is one way people can meet again, huh.

Description: ・Studio shooting ・Green screen shooting + CG ・On-location shooting were interwoven to visualize the world and lyrics of the song. ・Opening theme for Vinland Saga Season 2

Inspired by the collection theme “Time Traveler,” we incorporated “time play” throughout the video. Using GoPro Bullet Time with approximately 18 special rigs by Arata Fukoe, we created a playful sense of time by syncing the video with an original soundtrack by miffrino, including effects such as the afterimage of a person struck by strobe light and expressions of different speeds in the foreground and background. Within that, we added shifts in viewpoint, such as the camera entering a bag and switching its perspective around a ball, and brought the whole piece together as a seamless visual expression.

Description: ・A fashion show held in a virtual space with no spatial limitations ・A collection that returns to its roots Under these two themes, we created the world of an imaginary fashion show by adding LED screens and VFX. We placed importance on balancing the real and the virtual, and achieved a texture that could not be obtained with chroma key compositing. The scenes in which multiple models are lined up under spotlights were all composited in post-production.

We created this piece at the request of Sukima Switch, who asked for “the opening movie of a fictional animated work.” The video is themed around a protagonist struggling to change himself, but since it is an opening sequence for a fictional animation, we also incorporated visualizer-like elements and were mindful of the distance between sound and image in the production. For the dance scene in the chorus, we used a technique called rotoscoping. Only the dancers’ movements, captured simultaneously with multiple cameras, were traced, and the dance sequence was completed by connecting different angles through a transforming character. The dance scene’s background was also created based on CG, and combined with the subtly shifting camera angles, it helped create a surreal space.

Expresses how something takes shape and grows in a simple setting far removed from a stage. Created using Unreal Engine.

Surreal horror music video.