A music video created for an in-game song from Bandai Namco Entertainment’s social game The Idolmaster Gakuen. The character Hanami Saki was a top athlete in track and field before aspiring to become an idol, and she has a past in which, due to being a late bloomer, she confronted the limits of her abilities at a young age and suffered setbacks. The song’s theme portrays her “setbacks and challenges,” making for an absurd tale in which she moves back and forth between the reality of the setbacks she experienced in the past and the uncertain glory of the future. In the end, she attempts to break through her own limits. To make this pulp-fiction-like story convincing, we aimed for a meditative music video in which the past and future are suspended, combining the image of sequential photographs that draw the viewer’s consciousness back into the past with animation that propels her into the future to the sound of drum and bass. The spirit of craving victory that she cultivated in her years as an athlete, caught between ideals and reality, shakes off notions of records and victory created by others through the act of “running.” By adopting abstract smear frames and a rough, painterly style, we sought to convey, in a sensory way, her spiritual rebirth as an idol (a performer).

The music video is characterized by visual aesthetics that strongly reflect the song's sentimental and nostalgic mood. Utilizing the artist's personal past photographs, this visual nostalgia deeply explores the song's theme of what is lost in the process of becoming an adult.

Today's weather forecast ********************** This video work was exhibited in the group exhibition Character Matrix (2024), held at BUG, an art center operated by Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd. This work is an animation themed around "television," and it was created as three programs broadcast by the fictional TV station "Hoshinyan Broadcasting": "Nyan TV Weather Forecast!," "Nyan TV News," and "Angel TV Shopping." Hoshinyan is a character wearing a cat-shaped hood, with twin tails styled like shooting stars. All of the characters are drawn freely and intuitively, without any particular obsession with detail, but they are all easygoing and carefree in temperament. Also, the memory of the game "Domo-kun no Fushigi Terebi," which I was obsessed with in childhood, remains very strong, and its "cute yet slightly unreasonable worldview" and "easy, casual fun" also influenced this work.