This is an original segment for the new craft program “Ugo-Kousaku,” currently in development by the video streaming service U-NEXT and designer Masaya Ishikawa. When you access the web app on your smartphone, an animation appears over the live camera image. Tapping the screen triggers a single action, and the video asks viewers the question: “Where in the world would it be interesting to place this simple animation?” Through the way the animation’s size and appearance change depending on where it is placed—that is, through the illusion of size—the video also invites us to think about the way our eyes work. “Ugo-Kousaku” also conveys the joy of coming up with ideas and making things by hand through new craft and video experiences unique to streaming, using technology and optical illusions.

This CLIENT WORKS REEL focuses on the opening title and main footage of the program, on which we also worked from the logo design stage.

A VR installation work with the concept of a “space of sound.” It recreates the spatial dimension of music, with the aim of transporting one’s audiovisual perception into that space through an HMD. Music always possesses space and time. The groove created by one sound and another is the “ma” (interval), and what emerges from that is a “vast space.” By immersing oneself in that immense space, the work seeks to create an experience of being more fully enveloped by the spatiality of music.

When I was entrusted with the ending for the new anime adaptation of Yasuhiro Nightow’s TRIGUN, by the hugely popular manga artist behind series such as Blood Blockade Battlefront, I looked through a great deal of reference material and felt the poignancy and pain born from the love and sacrifice between two brothers who keep missing each other, as well as the strength to keep asking those questions despite everything. In addition, the quiet celebration and joy evoked by the star in the ending theme “Hoshi no Kuzu α” (Salyu × haruka) seemed to coexist with a certain sorrow—the ache of being unable to reach the stars. From these impressions, I chose to center the work on Knives’ perspective and the theme of stars, and rather than depicting stars as random lights or movements, I wanted to treat them as something with form and meaning, incorporating the myth of Gemini as one of the zodiac signs into the visual background. I also felt that the image of stars disappearing by morning and reappearing at night was closely tied to the relationship between the protagonists, Vash and Knives.