Music video for “cat step,” from daisuke tanabe’s latest EP “cat steps,” released in 2018. As the title suggests, it is an animated work in which a cat dances to the music. The entire piece is set in a world designed with rectangles, and the visuals begin to move in response to the track, as if a piano roll in a DAW had been brought to life.

Graduation project work. Production began around January 2021; the trailer was posted on YouTube on May 14, 2022, and the full version (about 7 minutes) on July 1. During my third year of university, I was almost constantly drawing MV illustrations for HoneyWorks. When I told Gom, the leader, “In my fourth year, I won’t be able to take on work because I’ll be focusing on my graduation project,” he said, “Then let’s make something together,” and asked me to handle the music side. That led to the launch of the creator team “Euluca Lab.” with the graduation project as its first work. I never expected to have a song produced for me — especially by HoneyWorks — so at first I had no idea of making an MV. Since my third year of high school, I had always planned to make a roughly five-minute animated story for my university graduation project, and I had kept that idea until I consulted Gom. Because of that, when it came time to make an MV, I couldn’t bring myself to create something with weak storytelling, so I decided to make the story just as important as the visuals. Even though it is an MV, I wanted the story to be depicted as clearly as possible. To do that, I had to convey almost the entire video without dialogue. What had originally been planned to be around four minutes ended up becoming seven before I knew it. Including cuts used only in the trailer, I produced about 140 cuts in total, handling everything myself: story development, storyboards, animation, backgrounds, 3DCG, compositing, and more. I also participated in lyric writing, added sound effects, and wrote the dialogue. I had mostly only drawn illustrations, so I didn’t have much experience with video production, and there was no one I could ask about how to make things. When thinking up the story, I first imagined the scene’s visuals and how it would be produced in my head, and prioritized whether I could actually make it myself. When I had a specific idea, like wanting to have glowing butterflies flying in 3D, I would research how to make it and judge whether it was feasible. I had never touched 3D before, but I managed to learn the basics and simple operations. As for drawing, I had only played around with Ugo Memo 3DS in junior high school, but I gradually became able to draw somewhat better, and my overall drawing ability improved quite a lot. During the year and a half of production, I sacrificed everything: play, socializing, and a normal human life. Wanting to avoid any regrets over my once-in-a-lifetime graduation project, I pushed myself to my limits. As a result, I came to think, “I worked hard because it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but I never want to make anime alone again.” In the future, I don’t plan to make an animation longer than 20 seconds by myself anymore. If I were to do something like directing or storyboard direction, I think I would also need to study how commercial anime is made. With the cooperation of people one would never expect for what was just a university graduation project, the quality of the music and character voices rose to a level that was hard to believe, and I felt a lot of pressure. That probably made things even more painful, but without that pressure, I think I would have settled for less in some parts. Of course, looking at it now, there are things I think could have been done better, but I gave it everything I had at the time. Because I hadn’t really worked hard for entrance exams or club activities, this became the first thing in my life I could say I truly “worked hard” on, and it became an important work to me. However, this is only the first work of Euluca Lab., so I think that someday I’ll need to create something even greater that I can say I worked harder on than this. Software used Animation, backgrounds, compositing: CLIPSTUDIO EX Background processing: Photoshop Compositing: After Effects 3DCG: Blender Editing: Premiere Pro *This is the full version of the work, but I think you may enjoy it even more if you watch the trailer before viewing it (or even after). Trailer https://youtu.be/SFhDPB74fK0

For a long time, every house in this country was inhabited by the yokai known as Yanari, or “house-rattlers.” But as wooden houses gradually fell into decline, they came to be inhabited only by the hard of hearing elderly, and the voices of the house-rattlers could no longer be heard. The house-rattlers sometimes feel lonely about that. The protagonist of this work is a small yokai, only a few inches tall, called “Yanari,” which appears in Japanese folklore. It has long been believed that the strange creaking and other mysterious sounds sometimes heard inside houses are the work of these beings, who try to startle the residents. In Japan, people have long believed that the homes they live in, like the house-rattlers, contain unseen shadowy aspects, and they have feared them, calling them “oni” and treating them as something distant from everyday life. Today, this culture is fading, and the residents who once sensed “oni” have grown old, as if living on the side of the oni as shadows of modern, bright society. This work is a video piece that depicts the figures of elderly people being left behind by contemporary society and creatures from folklore, using effects of shadow and light. This is an animated work shot by physically moving dolls on location in my grandmother’s 80-year-old house in a depopulated port town. That house had long accepted and seen off many residents over its 80-year history, and because it still bore traces of the lives they had lived there, I always felt the presence of something “uncanny” whenever I heard a house-rattler in the house, and as a child I was always afraid. In this work, faint natural light, shadows, and the contrast of light and dark shining through the transom were used to create effective boundaries between bright and dark areas inside a Japanese house. I attempted to recreate the folklore creature moving between light and shadow using actual dolls, making it seem as if it truly existed. By filming the dolls at their actual size as the scale of “Yanari,” I aimed to blend our everyday world with the world of animation, and to visualize the eerie presence lurking within the Japanese house.

Orix Buffaloes 2025 season CLAP movie. Screened on the main video board at Kyocera Dome Osaka before the bottom of the 8th inning. The transparent sections display live footage of the crowd from the stadium’s live camera, allowing fans to cheer along with the mascot characters by clapping.