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 words of Tahi Saihate, who has created many poems about constellations and the universe, leap off the page and light up the planetarium. Even the mythological explanations that connect one poem to another are entirely in the poet’s own words. Please enjoy this new kind of planetarium, where you can savor poems that shimmer in the night sky.

The music video for “Geki Yaba ∞ Boocan!!,” the first anime tie-in song by the DearStage-affiliated idol group Dempagumi.inc, which began at a maid café in Akihabara. Inspired by the lyrics evoking destruction and by Dempagumi’s emotional state, the concept of a “super special move” was launched. I&S BBDO’s Go Nagasaki handled the concept (along with the finer fighting-game references), while Toshitaka Shinoda directed the visuals (live-action segments and emotional tone) and Ohashi (CG, animation, and fighting-game references) was in charge of the rest. To convey the image of them carrying the culture as an idol group rooted in Akiba, the fighting-game aesthetic was expressed not as traditional pixel art, but through modern-looking 3DCG, crisp graphics, and CG-rendered images of destruction, highlighting their distinctive presence as more than just cute.