Yuurei ni Natte (2025)

While working onsite in Japan, I contributed to making the mouths for the phonemes in the chorus of the Yuurei ni Natte sequence. This involved hand-drawing a range of expressive mouth shapes, making variations of the same mouth shapes, and cutting them out so the paper can be physically attached to real-world objects.

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Using stop-motion techniques, I and a group of two others swapped out the mouths frame by frame, photographing each change to simulate singing. We aligned the elements using tacky putty and X’s on the back of our mouths to ensure the mouths were centered and captured at the same height of the previous mouths.

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Instead of using a tripod, we opted for the shaky feel of someone holding the camera as still as possible – the gentle micromovements added a more authentic and grounded feel in the environment. The locations we used were carefully scouted because we wanted references (like vending machines, Family Mart, etc.,) to locally ground this project in Japan.