Two people sneak into a decayed western-style mansion that no one lives in anymore. They move closer and closer to the secret hidden in the basement. Overall, the work was designed and art-directed to feel like viewing a piece of art, with everything from the costumes to the set design made noble and beautiful. The animation mixes rotoscoping with drawings based on rough key frames.

I created the music video for “True Self,” a track by WHISPER OUT LOUD, an alternative R&B/rock band based in Tokyo. For this project, I took on the major challenge of handling every stage of the video production myself, including directing, shooting (including aerial footage using a drone), lighting, editing, 3DCG, and VFX. All filming was done guerrilla-style outdoors, using a run-and-gun approach. Production was carried out with extremely limited resources: the shooting period was only one day, and the editing period was about two weeks. In particular, I used Blender in the 3DCG/VFX process to achieve large-scale, original visual expressions. This work expanded the possibilities of solo video production.

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Music video for Manami Kakudo’s “Mado kara Mieru.” This video was created with the idea that music and image in a music video should not merge into a single entity, but rather continue to exist in a multilayered relationship. In film, the role of a theme song is to make the film itself more complex. Yamagata sought to translate Kakudo’s sincere and straightforward approach to music and performance into a visual work with the strength to be appreciated from multiple, more complex perspectives.