Theme: “Joy, anger, sorrow, and delight / twists and turns, and life goes on.” Life is full of all kinds of emotions and many twists and turns. Through it all, time keeps moving forward, leading toward the future. I wanted to depict that journey as a drive, introducing a variety of motifs through collage and tracing the path all the way to space. First, I drew a map and structured the piece as if traveling through those places. The map used as the foundation shows the route from my parents’ home to downtown Hiroshima, but places with special meaning for Taiking, such as Enoshima, also appear. As this is meant to evoke a road movie, the piece also draws heavily on films by Wim Wenders.

Music video for singer-songwriter Yo Irie’s song “Iron Heart.” We lovingly filmed a laid-back day off of the protagonist, who usually works hard, or sometimes not quite so hard.

The MV for Satoko Shibata’s “Koukai,” which I got to shoot earlier, has become a new signature work of mine as well. At first I was congratulating myself, thinking, “Man, I’m such a genius to have shot something this amazing!” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what makes this video great is simply that Ms. Shibata is such an incredible artist; it’s not that I’m the amazing one lol... (sweat) I think Ms. Shibata is incredible. She’s not ordinary. Not just the song, but especially the lyrics are truly amazing. You can really come to understand the beauty of poetry as an art form. So, about this video: my impression of Ms. Shibata is that she’s basically quite natural and down-to-earth, but since she’s just plain (pardon me) beautiful and cute, I wanted to bring that out to the fullest. So I asked other people to do the hair, makeup, and costume, and said, “Make her look like Twice’s Nayeon!!” That’s how we shot it. (I was amused to see someone in the YouTube comments who had clocked the Nayeon reference for Shibata-san.) The flowers and jewels in the background were drawn by several people. Yamada Minori is a young animation artist I discovered on Twitter; her profile said she graduated from Tama Art University, so I asked her to do it, and as expected, she was absurdly good and I was seriously blown away. Her usual style doesn’t seem to be all about flashy technical skill, but art school grads really do have such strong foundational drawing ability... This kind of skill really felt like something you’d put in a frame (?), and placing it right next to Shibata-san’s face made the drawing even more effective at highlighting her beauty. Other artwork was also drawn by Hiroro Sato and my wife, Chiaki Sakamoto, and their pieces had a nice, distinctive flavor too. Since it’s a collage, the balance is fun.

Rock band “Necry Talkie” MV We 3D-captured the members and incorporated them into a video game-like world.