Translator: Sean Earley Reviewer: Riaki Poništ
Hello everyone.
Audience: Hello.
I am a fourth-year media design major at Hokkaido Information University.
And my name is Kento Fukuda.
The animations I'm showing now are my creation.
I make these kinds of moving words and images
which are types of imaging called motion graphics.
This clip is a compilation of all of the animations
that I have created up until now.
Today I would like to talk about
how I have gone about creating these animations since starting university.
Since I was young, I have always enjoyed making things.
In my final year of high school when I was picking my career choices,
my form teacher brought me a pamphlet on Hokkaido Information University (HIU).
I learned I could be a media design major at this university
and I could study design.
I was bad at drawing, and I, of course, had never done design before,
but I thought that maybe even I could create cool designs.
With those kinds of aspirations I began my course here at HIU.
However, as soon as I started, I fully realised how hard design was.
This is what I made in my first year
for a task that was to design a business card for an Italian restaurant.
As you can see,
I couldn't create as cool a design as I had originally been thinking.
Also there were many people around me who could make much better designs.
My motivation for design went further and further down.
Towards the end of my first year, I had already given up on design.
I went into my second year,
and I had just happened to be surfing the net
when, on NikoNiko Douga, I saw a Hatsune Miku animation,
which stole my heart.
(Music)
(Music ends)
It's so cool, isn't it?
The satisfaction of the music and images in complete synchronisation
and this design fascinated me.
From then on, I took an interest in video production
and thought I'd try and teach it to myself.
That was on the 1st June 2012.
That evening, I got straight into creating a video at home.
The video I made at that time was this:
(Music)
[ONE CHANCE]
[Movie Kento Fukuda]
[Music Shotaro Nakami]
[ONE CHANCE]
[END]
(Music ends)
At the time, I didn't have any skills in CG,
so I used a camera that I had at home to create this video.
I became more and more obsessed with creating animations.
During a class called 'project trial' during my second year of university,
I designed Fop, a men's cosmetics company.
The video I created at the time was this:
(Music)
Narrator: Wake up, men!
Hair colour wax!
Yeah, men can change.
[Can't men look fabulous?]
Choose from our four waxes to match your type of hair.
New! Fop!
(Music ends)
At this time, animation was just so fun
I was constantly thinking about and creating animations,
and that was my life.
However, since I didn't have any skills,
I couldn't create the kinds of cool animations that I wanted to,
so I constantly felt uneasy.
I went into my third year,
and I told myself firmly that I wanted to produce some kind of result
to boost my self-confidence.
So then I found a contest to create an advert for Gatsby (a cosmetic brand),
and I put forward this video.
(Music)
[Spiky Edge]
[Wild Shake]
[Multi Form]
[Loose Shuffle]
[Gatsby]
[Air Rise]
[Cool Wet]
[Grunge Matte]
[Moving Rubber]
[Gatsby] (Music ends)
This video wasn't good enough in the end and didn't win.
At the time, I was quite confident about my work,
so I took it pretty hard when it didn't win.
Why didn't this video manage to win?
In this contest,
originality and uniqueness of ideas and propositions were expected,
but at that time, I had been so concentrated on CG techniques
that I didn't think at all about ideas or propositions in my clip.
That was what was wrong.
So then I realised...
that you can't just study the technical side.
From then on, of course I continued to study the technical side as well,
but I also started to think more about ideas and propositions.
After some time had passed, around the end of my third year,
Someone contacted me on Twitter
and asked me to create a music video on Vocaloid.
I had been uploading my content to YouTube
so they had happened to have seen it and had reached out to me.
Things like that can happen!
So the video I made was called Caramel Tart.
(Music)
♪Those eyes are watching me♪
♪To touch me♪
♪That's just the stuff in dreams♪
♪I should have known♪
♪Why are there so many tear drops♪
♪Falling, I wonder♪
♪I want to end this before I fall for you♪
♪What should I do♪
[Caramel Tart]
(Music ends)
I submitted this video on NikoNiko Douga, a Japanese video-sharing platform,
and it was viewed around 50,000 times.
Since the lyrics of the song were about a young girl's romance,
I based my animation
on my imagination that teenagers nowadays are using smartphones and social network
for their love life.
People seemed to find this unique
and commented on the video saying 'unconventional' or 'interesting',
so I was extremely happy.
This experience reinforced my understanding
that it's not a high technical ability
but strong ideas and propositions that catch people's interest,
so that set my direction as a video creator.
I went into my fourth year and believed I had already become an expert.
However, one day a girl in the same seminar
said this to me:
'Fukuda, the videos you make are really cool,
but they look like I've seen them somewhere before.'
This one comment cut close to the bone.
Up until then I had been imitating what I found cool in other people's work
or adding something on to create videos.
This had been reflected in my own videos.
From this point on,
I believed I wanted to create animations that had never been seen before.
So I tried making this video:
(Music)
(Music ends)
This is the footage that I entered in this year's HIU advertisement contest.
Integrating QR codes as part of animation or advert
was something that had never been done,
so I designed a QR code and tried animating it.
I also made this video:
(Music)
♪Would be great to go to Tokyo City♪
♪Would be great to go♪
♪Would be great to go to Tokyo City♪
♪To go, to go, to go♪
[Tokyo City]
[Music by Tenkousei]
(Music ends)
My attempt at a paper-like quality in this video using the technique of 3DCG
won a prize in the student division of the Hokkaido Animation Contest 2014.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Also, I met someone on Twitter and we collaborated on this video:
(Music)
[Boisterous Grave ] [Layla]
(Music ends)
I used projection mapping on a headstone.
You may say, "It's ill-advised to project an animation on a headstone."
This is, of course, a fake one made out of Styrofoam.
Like this, I would make animations through trial and error,
but my own originality just wouldn't come out.
After brooding on this for a while,
because I was so often creating animations using CG,
I thought, 'Why don't I try some other presentation methods.'
The experimental hand-drawn animation that I tried out was the following:
(Music)
(Music ends)
What do you think?
I had one small take away from the creation of this clip.
Perhaps, using hand-drawn animation,
I would be able to create some more personal content.
That thought led me to create -
for my graduation project, a culmination of my four years -
a hand-drawn animation, which I am currently creating.
Lastly,
the TEDxHIU opening movie that you saw at the start
was created by me as well.
(Music)
(Music ends)
I took an interest in creating animations
because of a Hatsune Miku animation that I happened to see on NikoNiko Douga.
From then on, I created many animations,
collaborated with creators from the web whose faces I'd never seen
and won prizes in animation contests.
From April next year,
I'm starting a job in Tokyo at a video production company.
On the internet,
I believe there are many many more possibilities,
so I will be continuing to work even more from now.
Also, although there is a lot of content on the internet,
I believe that originality is vital,
so with my own originality,
I would like to continue to explore its depths.
These are my thoughts.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)