Description: The title “Hitori tte yatsu wa” and the lyrics convey a sense of everyday life that would arise from being “alone,” and I wanted to fully capture that through the situation and composition. Someone may usually handle work well and manage themselves effectively outside, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their solo days off are the same. A room overflowing with things left out, items used and never put away, and things left lying around. It’s not that they don’t care, but even when they try to tidy up, they get distracted by something else, and before they know it, nothing has been done and only time has passed. I planned this project thinking that there are probably many people who spend their days off like that. Another point I focused on was the passage of time in the video, which begins in the morning.

I directed and produced the music video for TOOBOE - Appare Kanpai.

A 360° hand-drawn VR animation by Kazuki Yuhara, who is enrolled in the Animation program of the Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts, this work is also a music video for the song of the same title by Shugo Tokumaru, whose work combines an experimental spirit with pop sensibilities. Centered on the theme of a single canary’s encounter with the world, every inch of the 360° space has been hand-drawn in vivid, meticulous detail. Compatible with VR headsets, full-dome screens, computers, and smartphones, the piece uses cinematic direction while guiding viewers toward immersion in a vast world within a virtual space that retains the freedom unique to VR. A work that seeks to redefine the music video, from something to be watched into something to be experienced.

The music video for “Koukai,” a track from Satoko Shibata’s Love Holiday The idea of filming Shibata-san’s face in an extreme close-up as she leaned out of a car window hadn’t even been conceived until the day of the shoot. In fact, on the day itself, we were filming scenes of her singing while playing guitar in a park. However, when I asked Shibata-san what image she had for the song, one of the things she mentioned was “an image like riding in a car and feeling the wind,” so we decided to also shoot that cut while traveling by car. And when we actually tried it... it was amazing. So I asked Shibata-san and her manager right then and there, “...Can we just go with this for everything...?” They kindly agreed, so after that we kept shooting car scenes nonstop. Then after the shoot ended and I went home to check the footage we had captured, since I had been filming handheld, the image was shaking all over the place (crying) So I immediately bought a gimbal to reduce camera shake, and we were able to reshoot two days later. When Shibata-san told me she imagined “riding in a car and feeling the wind,” the specific image that came to mind was the refreshingly great scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker escapes in a police car he stole from the police. I decided to film it in that mood, so from the very beginning I shot it as an extreme close-up of her face. Luckily, the weather on the day of the reshoot was incredibly nice. When it came time to do the grading, I aimed for a vivid, light-filled, refreshing feeling. It’s a video where it would not be an exaggeration to say that all you see is her face the whole time, and yet it never feels boring to watch because of Shibata-san’s humor, her cute charm as a woman, and her expressive power—or rather, her sheer humanity. I think this MV was born because Shibata-san herself takes responsibility for her own expression and carries it through to the end.