The music video for “Koukai,” a track from Satoko Shibata’s Love Holiday The idea of filming Shibata-san’s face in an extreme close-up as she leaned out of a car window hadn’t even been conceived until the day of the shoot. In fact, on the day itself, we were filming scenes of her singing while playing guitar in a park. However, when I asked Shibata-san what image she had for the song, one of the things she mentioned was “an image like riding in a car and feeling the wind,” so we decided to also shoot that cut while traveling by car. And when we actually tried it... it was amazing. So I asked Shibata-san and her manager right then and there, “...Can we just go with this for everything...?” They kindly agreed, so after that we kept shooting car scenes nonstop. Then after the shoot ended and I went home to check the footage we had captured, since I had been filming handheld, the image was shaking all over the place (crying) So I immediately bought a gimbal to reduce camera shake, and we were able to reshoot two days later. When Shibata-san told me she imagined “riding in a car and feeling the wind,” the specific image that came to mind was the refreshingly great scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker escapes in a police car he stole from the police. I decided to film it in that mood, so from the very beginning I shot it as an extreme close-up of her face. Luckily, the weather on the day of the reshoot was incredibly nice. When it came time to do the grading, I aimed for a vivid, light-filled, refreshing feeling. It’s a video where it would not be an exaggeration to say that all you see is her face the whole time, and yet it never feels boring to watch because of Shibata-san’s humor, her cute charm as a woman, and her expressive power—or rather, her sheer humanity. I think this MV was born because Shibata-san herself takes responsibility for her own expression and carries it through to the end.

A place in the middle of nowhere. Their two souls return to the sky.

Produced the music video for “After That,” a song that brought back Misora Hibari’s singing voice using VOCALOID:AI. Takeshi Kitano, Lily Franky, EXILE ATSUSHI, Rino Sashihara, Nijiro Murakami, and Sena Nakajima. With the thought that “After That” is not just a song to reminisce about the past, but a song for the future, we had people from different generations, from 72 years old to 13 years old, each living with their own distinctive perspectives and values, listen to the song, and portrayed their raw emotions and words in portrait form.