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Komyaku’s Dancing Garden, Komyaku’s Farewell - 映像作家: hirai
3DCGCo-CreationGenerative ArtInstallationProjection mappingReal-time Graphics

Komyaku’s Dancing Garden, Komyaku’s Farewell

2025
00:01:41
This work is a video piece that was exhibited and screened as part of an ambient projection-mapping presentation at the EXPO Hall “Shine Hat” and the Popup Stage East Outside at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. Taking as its motif the “EXPO 2025 Design System” IDs, affectionately known as “Komyaku” at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, and with Kohta Hikichi, a representative member of the team that created it, serving as an advisor, we drew on the expertise in artificial-life ecological systems that HiRai has long been researching to create a real-time video simulation system and visuals. In producing the video, we referenced the design system’s history of being prototyped based on metaballs, and developed a real-time simulator in which the Komyaku behave as if they were alive while retaining the identity of the design itself. By using GPGPU to calculate the interactions among large numbers of Komyaku in real time, we built a system that can be flexibly expanded to support a wide range of possibilities, including interaction and the generation of one-of-a-kind videos. At the Popup Stage East Outside, we also took advantage of the architectural characteristics of a structure in which the projected image is interrupted by support columns, and created visuals that made it look as though each steel beam were packed full of Komyaku. We pursued video production that made the most of the characteristics of the projection surface. The name “Komyaku” naturally spread as a nickname referring to the IDs that make up the design system. Taking into account this derivative, fan-created cultural expansion, this work intentionally uses the term “Komyaku.”
Phantom Siita "Rose-Colored Moon" (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) - 映像作家: kazukigotanda
Music videoPaper craftStopmotion

Phantom Siita "Rose-Colored Moon" (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

2026
00:03:45
In this work, built around a new song by Phantom Siita, I sought to foreground the group’s aesthetic beauty and darkness while using Le Fanu’s vampire tale Carmilla as a motif, creating a world that unfolds like a Gothic short film. I had long thought that I wanted to make a vampire film at least once in my lifetime, and when I saw “Carmilla” written in a note from producer Ado, I was extremely excited. Among films based on Carmilla, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is one of my all-time favorites, and throughout this production I also kept thinking about the ashen, anemic pallor of Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, another vampire film. The setting is an old mansion that appears on a night of the full moon. Through the process of the girl Heine wandering into the mansion and getting swept up in the Phantom Siita’s—vampires’—festival, the film hints at an unnameable emotional wavering that cannot be clearly defined as romance, dependence, or illness. Visually, while drawing on European Gothic sensibilities and the decadent atmosphere of filmmakers such as Daniel Schmid, I aimed for a textured expression that combines live action and analog collage to depict “illness ≠ love.” That emotion is strictly not equal; here, I do not present it in an easy-to-understand way as “love is an illness.” By portraying, on the same plane, emotions that cannot be labeled—“I love you, I’m drawn to you, I want to hold on to you but I don’t want to, I want to run away, I want to live, I want to die, and I don’t want to die either”—alongside a body that grows weaker and more exhausted, I tried to express that this ungraspable feeling is real. As for the collage, rather than shooting against a green screen, we filmed in a studio filled with vintage props and similar items. Because the relationship between space and the people within it was necessary, and because collage needed to draw out that magnetic field in order to create a distortion of reality, I have lately tried to avoid using green screen as much as possible. By dismantling those elements, I wanted to portray a blurred consciousness and memory shaped by the dislocation of time and space. As for the collage method itself, we would print out live-action frames that had been shot and create animation while rearranging them, and even before shooting there were times when fragments of blurred consciousness, the mansion, or parts of scenes were assembled into analog collages.

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