Commentary: As the external creative director of Mercari’s in-house “CXO Design Team,” which is leading the rebranding of Mercari, Japan’s largest flea market app, Masashi Kawamura joined the project and worked on the renewal of Mercari’s logo as his first assignment. The design and animation retain the brand identity of “the excitement of bursting out of a box,” while creating a simpler, friendlier logo mark that expresses Mercari’s vision of an open and fair marketplace. https://design.mercari.com/jp/hello-new-logo/

This is a “purpose movie” expressing Orizo Inc.’s purpose. It is a lyric video set to an original song, “Purpose Song (Company Anthem Rap),” created by the rapper Pony-san to express that purpose. When we proposed a concept of “a video that chaotically mixes various tones and moods, like the thoughts running through each employee’s mind,” the client liked it and told us, “Please really do whatever you like!” At our company, we usually proceed with projects by carefully building design and motion structures based on a wide range of elements, so for this video, our biggest challenge was “taking the limiter off our heads.” We also used characters that were doodled by our staff five years ago in the middle of the video, and being able to try things that would not be possible in ordinary client work was very memorable.

A story of a man who, after enduring countless torments of hell, comes to possess himself. I aimed to depict universality that feels real to myself and to Velladon by projecting it onto Trinitarian thought and Kafkaesque absurdity. The work was created while evoking mythology and history around the Roman Empire. The black figure is Y, the silver figure is N. Y and N are the same person, and by driving one of them to the extreme, the other breaks free of absurdity and comes to possess himself as one being. Compared with my most recent works, the darkness of the story and the worldview express my direction much more purely.

Various patterns of life and death glimpsed in the moments before drifting off on an operating table. Did the surgery end safely? Is the patient alive now? This work is a stereoscopic experimental film inspired by the creator’s own experience of, upon waking from a dream, sensing that the left eye and the right eye were seeing different worlds. In addition to creating a sense of depth across layers, the hand-colored metamorphosis animation drawn on paper was transferred into digital form, after which rounded contours were added to match the shapes. We also studied how to achieve a visual balance in expressing the idea that the left eye and the right eye are seeing different worlds, and made careful adjustments repeatedly.