Satoko Shibata "Namida" (Official Video)

This is the MV for Akiyama Kiiro, a male solo musician, and it had been a while since I’d done a boys’ MV, so I wondered if I’d be okay—but in terms of the song style and the content, I really felt it matched me perfectly. When I first got an email asking if they could put me forward as a director candidate, I still only knew the song title, but just seeing the word “Sonic Move” made me imagine almost exactly what the current concept would be. So I was like, “Please let me do this!” For lighting, it was Hirai from Office Doing, who I’ve worked with for a long time. Hirai is honestly such a great person, absolutely the best. He’s helped me so much since the days when I didn’t know left from right, and I’m always insanely grateful. And for the camera, I did it myself. There’s the saying “use a specialist for each job,” so part of me always wants to leave shooting to a cinematographer, but with green-screen work, it’s not an ordinary shoot, so if you don’t shoot with editing in mind, it’s basically meaningless. Lately I’ve also been vaguely thinking it might actually be faster to do it myself, so this time I shot it myself. There was only one subject, and I wasn’t planning to do any camera movement anyway. Still, I really want to get over this whole “I want to do everything myself” thing... I rented an FX6 because I wanted to try it, but it was so ridiculously pro-level that I had no idea how to use it and it was difficult, and with my level of understanding there was no way I wouldn’t totally bomb the shoot, so I didn’t even bring it. In the end I shot with my usual a7s3, and honestly it’s the best—easy to use, beautifully clean footage, absolute strongest. Love it. I recorded in ALL-Intra. Compared with H.265, editing is like ten times lighter, and when I was editing an MV shot in H.265 before, the accumulated edits toward the end made it so heavy that AE stopped working and I couldn’t even render it, which was way too dangerous, so ALL-Intra is definitely the way to go. With ALL-Intra, even if the edit gets heavy toward the end, it barely holds up. You need V90 SD cards and the files are big, but well, that’s a tiny trade-off. You can always convert only the parts you need to ProRes, but I end up doing all kinds of things all the way through anyway. So I shot a bunch of things, even rented a stunt bike for the motorcycle scenes, and wrapped the shoot smoothly. For offline editing, I had director Kotaro Saito, whom I often ask, do it, and although he polished it into a nice shape, editing with only green-screen material and no clues in the background is still hard, isn’t it... sorry... So from there I tweaked it a lot, big and small, to match my own tempo and sense of timing, and it was fun. For the CG too, the background for the motorcycle scene was made by a creator named Ai Ikeda, and it was amazing. The other scenes—the game center and the cityscape—were made by me. But you know, unlike the idol groups I usually work with, there’s only one person, so it’s just so much easier. Having that kind of freedom to make it interesting is the best. I could have done camera movement and tracking to get that realistic coolness, but since the subject was just one person, I decided to shoot it fixed and then do the camera work in CG afterward. From an editing standpoint too, this was overwhelmingly faster. Removing tracking markers takes several steps, and tracking itself takes time. With a short deadline, I didn’t want to spend time on that. If you think about shots where camera movement really matters, honestly up to around a trio, fixed shots might be fine. Well, it depends on the deadline. Anyway, since this time too the deadline was one of those classic major-label-short-turnaround situations, I shot with a shot list and system that anticipated the later editing schedule. In the end, I barely used any footage with actual camera movement, and almost everything was shot fixed and then moved afterward. By the way, from shooting to deadline it was less than 20 days, so for me it was cutting it pretty close. Since there was no time, I was making a bunch of things in parallel, and I didn’t have time to refine this and that, so I kept spreading out predictions—using instinct and experience to anticipate “if I do this, it’ll probably turn out like that”—and I made it with almost no detailed checking until the end. Still, I’m glad I was able to really push it right up to the very last moment. It’s really great work when making it is fun. Thank you very much. But in the end, the best part was that before making this, I had bought and studied a course on coloso by director/VFX artist Reo Wakui, and that was seriously, insanely useful. I’d been making green-screen videos for ages, and I was like, “Wait, I had no idea how to pull greens or handle masks at all this whole time!?” Thanks to that course, keying became much easier all at once, and as a result, even with color work—which I’d always been bad at—I’m not good yet at all, but I got to the point where it feels like if I study a bit more, I might actually be able to do it well. Things like linear workflows and ACES are apparently standard now, and I really would never have known that if I hadn’t bought this course, so I’m glad I studied... Also, I really think if I understand lighting and color correction, I’ll be the strongest. I’ve gotten this far just working alone by instinct with no knowledge at all, so if I study, I’d be way too powerful, right? My potential is insane. I also want to understand CG. I seriously don’t get it. I’m always making things by feel, just feeling my way through... Oh, and after this was released, I was ego-searching and found out that the drummer on this track was Hiroshi Kido, someone I’d met a few times in Kyoto when I was around 20. We were almost the same age, and back then I was also in a band and pretending to be a drummer, but Hiroshi suddenly appeared in the local live-house scene around that time as an absolutely incredible drummer. I thought, wow, amazing—and soon after, he became the drummer for Kenichi Asai’s band and turned pro. As for me, I kept smoldering away for several years, living a trashy life, the band broke up, I quit music, and now I’m where I am today through video work, which I started as a hobby. I doubt he remembers me, but it was nostalgic and somehow made me happy. So this is one way people can meet again, huh.

Since this was the music video for the opening theme of the hit anime *Ya Boy Kongming!*, we prepared costumes inspired by all kinds of party people. I thought this was the kind of project that avex is often known for, where they force a Japanese cover onto a foreign dance track like MAX’s “TACATA’” or DA PUMP’s “U.S.A.,” so rather than making it feel like a standard female idol dance MV, I wanted it to have a sort of joke-like quality. That’s why I took the feel of a Para Para instruction video, or those avex trance MEGAMIX videos that were everywhere in the ’90s and 2000s, and warped it through a 2022 sensibility to create a kind of outrageous spectacle you’ve never seen before. The background is constantly shimmering and insanely acidic, creating a totally incomprehensible cutting-edge design where momentum, madness, coolness, lameness, and stylishness all exist at the same time. The animation near the end, which shows Shibuya—the setting of *Ya Boy Kongming!*—being covered in hearts by a kaiju’s heart attack, was created by Rapparu!!!!! Thanks to this animation, the MV gained so much depth and became a very moving piece of footage. Rapparu’s animation is truly the best.

It was so fun to make that I can barely think of any other project I’ve enjoyed creating this much. Once I got into the work, it came together in no time at all. I just kept digging deeper and deeper into my own sense of humor, making it based on whether I could laugh first and think, “This is amazing! So cool!!” When the ocean scene (0:56–) came together, it was so funny that I was moved. Seriously, so cool. That said, I think the members who can really embrace this kind of comedy are amazing. People like that are incredibly rare. I think it’s because of the breadth of everyone’s expressiveness. I mean, you can’t even tell whether they’re doing it as a joke or seriously, right? They’re all completely serious. That’s why I think it’s the best, and that’s what really moved me. By the way, although I made this look like low-quality VHS footage, it was actually shot in 8K with a Sony a1 camera.

I just absolutely love the song! The moment I heard it, colorful candies started spinning around in my head. Since it’s “daishikyuu,” I wanted to make something fast-paced, chaotic, and above all super cute, so we had lots of costumes prepared, along with a bike, props, and all kinds of things for the shoot. With the theme of dreams you see while sleeping, I imagined a story like this: you desperately need to wake up, but you can’t get out of the dream world and end up going on a wild rampage! Also, I planned it with an image of a struggle over who has dominion over the dream—whether it’s Kana-chan’s dream or Sakina-chan’s dream, whose dream is it, anyway!? In the end, the domination battle element was removed, and it was shaped into more of a dream world, a cute little space, and that sort of image... When I listen to the song, it gives me the image of the two of them playing sports, and I pictured them wearing baseball uniforms in a gyaru style. I thought it would be absolutely adorable, so we went with it. (Kind of like Ayaya’s “Tropica~l Koi Shite~ru” lol) I also pushed for us to film the bike scene. When you think of speed, you think of a bike. The animation is also gorgeous, and for the very first OP animation, I asked misa to create something based on the idea that it takes place inside a girl’s dream. It’s insanely cute and amazing. The animation for the first chorus is the scene where they blow away the nightmare, and that was created by RaParu-san. I’ve loved RaParu-san for a long time and always hoped we’d get to work together someday... so I was really happy that my wish finally came true. And for the flashy effect animation in the baseball scene, of course it had to be Tetsuya Tatamiya-kun, the reliable go-to for effect animation!