For the official music video of Dios’s new song “Tasogare,” released in January 2025, I was in charge of some of the cuts. My part consists of two cuts, from 0:29 to 0:32 and from 0:33 to 0:45, totaling about 15 seconds. From the start, the director wanted me on board and cited my self-produced work from three years ago, “Motete!,” as a reference. The method itself — combining motion graphics with footage of my own hands — may already be becoming something of my signature. In “Motete!,” the goal was to create a strange, one-of-a-kind sensation, where hands and shapes guide one another and are guided in return, as if each possessed free will. For this piece, building on that experience and refining it further, I shifted away from a flat, clean style and instead went for an alluring look where dark yet vivid, eerie gradients intertwine, much like “nostalmic” (2023/2). This work feels almost like a mixture of the methods and style approaches from my previous two self-produced pieces, with the hands and shapes boldly and three-dimensionally intertwining as if they had always been there together, elegantly carrying the chorus. As a result, it seems I was able to express a world quite different from the one in my earlier independent works. In the chorus, the lyrics first say, “the gap in the night when I know I can’t escape from you.” Too brief to satisfy, too much to forget. The song uses “tasogare” as a metaphor for something that bewitches and captivates in that way. The chaos resulting from being driven mad by twilight and becoming dependent on love in that “gap in the night” is what is sung in the first chorus. The fact that it is “impossible to escape” is expressed by having the alluring shapes rolled between the two hands. Rather than simply trapping them, it suggests being played with in the palm of invisible hands, despite seeming free. Also, in “the gap in the night,” the scene transitions to a cut where an actual gap is filled by the night itself (the black background), revealing a bright, gradient-infused “sexiness.” However, in the following lyric, “carelessly reached out my hand,” the visuals do not literally show a hand reaching out. Rather than depicting the lyrics too directly, I devised the direction with a subtle balance: at first glance the connection seems thin, but upon noticing the finer details, the meaning comes through clearly. In this music video, where extensive use of 3DCG and a relatively flat style not especially wrapped in effects fill most of the runtime, my section stands out as an extremely unusual presence. But in terms of the overall dynamics, I think it also worked clearly as a contrast.

Description: “The infinite loop of exposing one’s shame under the name of a work” If those geniuses didn’t exist, wouldn’t my own work be recognized more? No, in the end, without those geniuses, I wouldn’t even exist in the first place. This is a song born of envy and admiration for geniuses. The video features many moths and butterflies. I created all of the music and visuals myself. The piece made in 2020 has been remixed, revised, and expanded, and is now released as the 2024 version. #Hashtag Animation Fes 2021 — Arch Co., Ltd. Award (previous version)