We produced the collaboration music video “Echoes of Silence” by The Weeknd and Hajime Sorayama. Launched as a flagship project for The Weeknd’s 10th anniversary, this fully 3DCG work was completed over a production period of approximately two years with a team of more than 50 staff members. Centering on Hajime Sorayama’s globally acclaimed “Sexy Robot,” it visualizes an epic romantic tragedy. At HOEDOWN, we handled the concept, planning, direction, and production in an integrated manner.

Socks all muddy. What if Mom gets angry at me...? An animation created based on memories from early childhood. When children realize that there is a world bigger than the one they themselves perceive, they feel a very embarrassing and complex emotion. I believe that children gradually grow up through experiences like this. It was made on a PC with techniques designed to make it look like an analog production.

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Music video included on the first-press bonus edition of rapper-singer DAOKO’s second album. Since the song title is “Boku,” we developed the idea of “selfies and Instagram,” and because it was also meant to be an animated MV, we planned to use photographs for the backgrounds in order to reduce production time while improving quality. Based on that, we proposed a plot in which “while playing with an AR selfie app, you get sucked into an AR world and drift through cyberspace.” In keeping with lyrics that suggest DAOKO, after her major-label debut, gained new fans while also losing old ones, the MV depicts high school–aged daoko confronting the post-major-debut DAOKO, with the unsettling story gradually unfolding as her personality is peeled away, like a broken link on a website.