Zen deserves recognition for its emotional sensitivity, for its beauty and for its sheer poetry.

This work entitled Zen depicts what I think and feel, inspired by the environments and events surrounding me. The concept underlying this work is “the cherry blossoms season”, “mutation”, “in the fog”, “serenity and dynamism”, “moving vividly and lively”, “fragrance of the spring season”, “inconsistency between thought and action”, “chain reactions”, “an organized world”, “unforeseeable world”, “the inert self”, “tension”, and “explosion”, etc. Those concepts were chosen, as they were best fit to what I felt in creating this work. Repeated observation of characters in the work in the course of creating it brought calmness in my mind, and the world that I tried to create was gradually shifted to the world of meditation.

In the first part of the work, many characters appear in a group and many hairy creatures appear and fade out. However, toward the end of the work, the scenes are getting rather simple on the screen. This may reflect my own mind. In the last scenes, the accumulated tension is suddenly released, and the screen starts to show the essence of the works to the viewers as if they recall all the scenes as they appear and go in their mind’s eye. This is when the viewers will experience the meditation that I have sought.

It was possible to complete the work thanks to an original tool developed especially for the production of the work, which was used to manipulate characters and a group of hairy creatures that appeared in the works at my fingertips. The tool is able to manipulate the unique movement of characters and the group of hairy creatures, create the concept of world peculiar to the work, control color arrangement and render the feeling of the hair volume of creatures.

In addition, the movement of characters and the group of hairy creatures can be controlled with a simple manipulation by changing various parameters in the tool that controls their movement. The tool is equipped with a GUI (Graphical User Interface), whereby each parameter is shown in the slide bar, so that any unexpected motion and unique world view may be achieved. The GUI, like a synthesizer to control the tone and quality of sound, enabled the tool to create the unique motion of various characters and the group of hairy creatures, emphasize their existence and compensate for the characters’ movement quite easily and freely.

In developing the tool, I always had real time in mind. Thanks to the tool, the characters were imbued with life, and I was able to easily recognize their movement. It was these techniques that enabled me to view their world in the computer and shoot the camera. There were a number of steps in completing the work using this tool.
Firstly, I developed a basic program and added several algorithms to control the movement of 16 kinds of characters and the group of hairy creatures. Then motion tests were conducted for each one of the algorithms, and I modified and tested it again as required. This series of steps resulted in producing an animation that gives the sense of "beautiful," "fun," "mysterious world" that has "never existed."

Through the validation of approximately 16 algorithms, two were selected as main algorithms for the work. The producer repeated additional motion tests and added improvements to the algorithms several times. Through an enormous number of motion tests, the final tools were completed for producing the work.

From the middle to the last stage of tool development, I sorted and categorized the motions of each character and the group of hairy creatures and organized the structure of the work. I sometimes had to reorganize it. And finally the work was completed.
It would give me utmost pleasure if you could watch the work repeatedly and share what I experienced during the production period.