SEKAI NO OWARI collaborated with Marvel on a comic. The program “Re:IMAGINE,” released on YouTube, is a seven-part documentary that follows the process of completing the music video “Stargazer” based on that comic. In the sixth installment, I talk about the video production.

Kis-My-Ft2 / We were responsible for part of the VFX scenes in the “Loved One” music video. We produced the video while actively exploring new methods of expression, so that the game world created by the members and the real-world setting would resonate with each other in an engaging way.

Description: An installation-style music video work using 20 displays of various ages, both old and new. All of the displays are synchronized, and the objects appearing in the video move back and forth across the screens as the piece unfolds. When an object crosses the boundary between old and new screens, it transforms into graphics suited to the visual language of the era in which that display was used, and the imagery transitions accordingly. After filming these monitors again, inserts were added to reinforce the unfolding narrative, and the work was packaged as a single “music video.” In response to recently emerging forms of expanded-reality visual expression such as VR and AR, as well as highly detailed, realistic CG that is nearly indistinguishable from reality, the artist focused on graphics, the social background of each era, and changes in trends to depict “video” as a medium that has been evolving into a higher-dimensional existence in just 20 years since the artist was born. This was expressed as a video work that takes on different forms as it unfolds across a variety of old and new displays.

From the song, I felt a summer-ambience kind of vibe and envisioned something ambient and electronic, so I wanted to make the visuals feel cool and refreshing. Although the meaning of the scenes themselves is abstract, I aligned the visuals with the beat and repeated the processes of editing and creating material to match the worldview of the lyrics, aiming for something that felt cohesively connected overall. For the graphic production and compositing (mainly in Blender, with a little final work in AE as well), I kept searching for something that matched the worldview and was pleasant to watch. During the material creation stage, I tried many different things with compositing in Blender, experimenting through trial and error, and connected various nodes together so that, even within abstraction, it would become something attractive and evocative. I did a lot of experimenting.