I had the honor of directing the music video for “animation” by AliA, a six-member hybrid rock band. Set in a fictional Shibuya and a masked group, I developed and directed a story from the concept stage that blurs the line between reality and dreams.

Terminal Slam Music Video is a Diminished Reality / Mixed Reality music video in which all advertisements in the city are erased or replaced with Squarepusher-related ads. Daito Manabe created this MV, imagining that in the near future, as shown in this music video, AR/MR glasses will make it possible to freely rewrite cityscapes. Using machine learning technology, we performed: - Object Detection (identifying the positions of objects in an image) - Semantic Segmentation (labeling each pixel in an image and categorizing image regions according to their meaning) - Image Inpaint (image restoration) Most advertising billboards in the city change periodically, so with current technology it was difficult for machines to recognize them accurately; therefore, the billboard position data was created manually. In addition, mask information was generated from the analysis data and positional data, and post-processing was performed, such as applying glitch effects only to areas where people or advertisements exist, and applying optical camouflage effects. Furthermore, because the process of extracting advertisement regions could not be accomplished using existing machine learning technologies alone, manual operations were also carried out for elements that could not be realized with the technology available at present. We anticipate that in the near future, all of this will be done automatically.

Brand film for the table tennis brand Butterfly. It beautifully intertwines live-action footage featuring rallies between 16-year-old prodigy Tomokazu Harimoto and German top player Timo Boll with CG, tightly synchronized to sharp sound design, depicting the brand’s worldview and the product’s powerful spin. This project began with the brief: “We want a video with an overseas feel that completely refreshes the image of table tennis, which is strongly associated with school club activities.” It was a collaboration with an amazing team, including director Takcom, who has worked with us since the days of W+K Tokyo Lab, the predecessor of JKD, and media artist Nobumichi Asai. Through many discussions with a passionate client and numerous staff members, this work was created with a focus on how to fuse the authenticity of the sport of table tennis with creativity.

JKD planned and produced the music video for “With The Love In My Heart,” released as the first lead single from Grammy Award-winning artist Jacob Collier’s new four-disc album. JKD planned and produced the music video for “With The Love In My Heart,” released as the first lead single from the four-disc album by Jacob Collier, the 1994-born Londoner and already a two-time Grammy Award winner in his mid-twenties. To express the many facets of Jacob Collier’s musicality as a genius musician and multi-instrumentalist who skillfully plays a wide range of instruments, a music video based on the idea of using mirrors was conceived. The song’s concept (lyrics) depicts Jacob’s journey in search of love until he finds it. The 6:45 long track is structured around five different elements that unfold dramatically. In this music video, Jacob’s journey to find love is dynamically portrayed as a story in which he travels through a five-dimensional world inside mirrors, moving back and forth between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness, while conjuring up a variety of visual magic through a fusion of reflections from a mirror setup installed in the studio and CG composites.