ISCA INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS CREATIVE AWARD 2023

A youth baseball team is trying to take a group photo at a riverside park after winning a summer tournament. They are too excited to take the picture. One of the boys is quiet and reserved. While everyone falls down and starts to play with each other, the boy gets caught in the middle and is crushed. Unable to breathe, his consciousness fades away. On top of all that… A mysterious experience on a summer day unfolds for a 11-year-old boy.
The main technique used in this work is rotoscope, which draws pictures from live-action video. The aim was to create a short animation with a peculiar summer feel.

Based on the director's firsthand experience with sexual initiation, this film tackles the often neglected theme of "sex" in the process of growing up. It is divided into four episodes and composed as a single work. Using the English metaphor "the elephant in the room" for "adults pretending that sex does not exist," the artist expresses the current lack of sex education. The transforming elephant is depicted to symbolize the impression that sex gives me. Hand-drawn analog is used as the main visual, while stop-motion, live-action compositing, and other techniques were explored in the creation of this work.
How should we understand our bodies when no one talks about "sex"?

Yuzuki is unable to give Valentine's Day chocolates to the boy friend she has feelings for. Yuto, who will soon become an older brother, has to resist eating candy for children. Nobuyuki is troubled by his inability to talk well with girls his age. Their small pride, which prevents them from being honest, is intertwined by their silly egos.
You may find the troublesome human traits endearing.

Masayasu Mashita begins daily broadcasting on Yootubee, a video sharing service. One day, he responds to a viewer's absurd request with "Okay-Mashita!" The viewers' response exceeds Mashita's expectations, and Mashita feels the pleasure of having his need for approval satisfied. Mashita responds to every request with the signature line, "Okay-Mashita!" and has built a position as a popular streamer. Mashita's behavior becomes uncontrollable, and it is escalating day by day.
This human drama focuses on the desire for approval that is captured on social media.

There is a girl who has never known light other than from a lamp. One day an earthquake strikes, and she ventures into the world of "OUT" for the first time in her life, and sees a brilliant garden at night. A soft breeze runs over the grass, the flowers have a dreamy fragrance, and the moonlight on the ceiling envelops the girl. Then she meets a mysterious boy who is frightened of this bright and beautiful garden, calling it "dark and frightening".

It is rainy on the field trip day that a girl was looking forward to. She heads to school feeling sad. She makes various discoveries in the rain on her way and comes to like rainy days a little.
The goal is to express the feeling of a rainy day. By choosing the colors that reflet mental state of each scene, it is attempted to create a visual expression with the spirituality of a contemporary painting . It is tried to visually capture both the objective beauty that can only be depicted by computer graphics and the subjective beauty of analog painting materials. AfteraEffects was used to create the uneven and overlapping color textures seen in watercolor and oil paintings, which were then assigned to animations created with 3DCG.

The nighthawk, Yodaka, is an ugly bird. One day, a hawk forces Yodaka to return its name. Yodaka resists, and learns the rules of living in this world through suffering. (Based on Kenji Miyazawa's "The Nighthawk Star")
The idea of how we perceive the world leads us to look back at "The Nighthawk Star." Then, three questions about "The Nighthawk Star"
●What does "home" mean to Yodaka?
●Why does Yodaka burn himself?
●Why does Yodaka desperately defend his name?
The answers to these three questions will be sought in the production based on "The Nighthawk Star."

The boy has two things he is afraid of.
The first is the sea at night. The second is his soon-to-be-born baby sister who is in his mother's stomach. He does not know what is going on inside the sea at night or the sister in his mother's stomach.
He is so scared of these two things…

A city is a space supported by architecture, but it is also a space of experience that sustains our lives. The outlines of urban architecture frame our space-time as we walk through the city with unwavering lines. This is the reason why numerous video works have contained walls, corridors, and pillars. In this project, we attempted to disturb the borders that run the length and breadth of the city with time-lapse video using AI-based image completion. With urban landscapes whose contours shimmer indeterminately, the artist attempted to depict a world in which the border between reality and information space will soon be blurred.

In the film, Deirdre, a female protagonist in her twenties, attempts suicide, which led her mother, lover, and friends to read her diary. The diary describes the world inside Deirdre's mind, and through its contents, those who read the diary learned her deepest sufferings...

How is the world seen by an island – a place made of multitudes, living and nonliving? The space and time through multispecies viewpoint is infinitely complex and narrowing it down to linear film might seem impossible. Island of Multitude gets entangled in the island’s complex world following and building connections between different agents of the island. The contact points are observed from multiple perspectives with each new viewpoint forming an even more complex web. In the end this film is just one story out of the millions that unfold on the island on a daily basis.

In the world we live in today, countless tragedies and sufferings occur in every corner. None of us can guarantee that we will not be the next victim to be crushed by life's iron fist. We are controlled by an intangible force, and we must find a way to seek redemption. It is in this context that my project takes root. I aim to remind people not to forget history and to view the world we live in dialectically. And encourage them to question the invincible forces and to use their courage to guard their inner voices.

Our project “On the 8th day” anchored the current debate about the climate crisis and also the anthropocene concept, a geological era in which humans are the main force of change on earth. Referring to the bible, our short film shows the eighth day of creation : It took 7 days to create the world, it only took one to disrupt its balance.
We now invite you, through this short colorful film and its unconventional narration, to discover a unique, fabric and plushes planet full of life and to live a few moments of this distinctive 8th day. Enjoy the movie !

Mischa, a little girl living in the suburbs of Moscow, spends most of her time in her room, crafting things with paper mache. One day, she makes a beautiful violin, and as the sound of her new instrument fills her apartment, a wonderful enchanted forest of paper grows. In this forest, live big monsters for whom Mischa wants to play. But the less they listen to her playing the violin, the more the Wolf dangerously prowls in the woods, closer and closer to the little girl.

Our story takes place in Gooseville, a small french village close to nothing and far away from everything. It is a place where the villagers, the Goosevillers, lead themselves to destruction. The inhabitants live off the farming of species that they overexploit each time, from geese to tadpoles.
Their story begins in the early 50s, where each and everyone is a hunter. They then become workers as their home modernizes and industrializes. Their tale ends in the new millennium, after status changement, jobs transformation and unfortunately, no mindset evolution and no lesson learnt from their mistakes.
Each new managing and self consuming environment is told throughout low budget homemade TV shows. Advertising, teleshopping and others display us the devolution of a village rushing towards its end.

Sounds turn into abstract images. This black and white abstract animation aims to visualize the music by artist duo dadahack, enhancing it by adding a visual layer to the acoustic. A combination of mixed-media materials, chemigrams, drawing, and analog and digital animation techniques are used to create a tightly connected audiovisual experience.
The visual elements are simplified and reduced to ordinary shapes and textures. Lines, dots, squares, and fluid shapes make up the main elements of the boiling animation. The visual reduction, including the absence of color, is used to gain focus and tightly match the animation to the music.

This work is a digital jigsaw puzzle of changing rules. In conventional jigsaw puzzles, the puzzle is completed based on static elements such as the shape or the picture pattern of the pieces; however, this work eliminates these elements and gives the puzzle interactive rules instead. Each time a puzzle is completed, the pieces are randomly rearranged, and the puzzle is restarted with new rules. Since no explanation of the rules is given to the player, he or she would use his or her senses and intuition to adapt to the changing rules of the puzzle.

The SPATIALIZER converts the uneven surfaces of the space and the location of people into sound. It does not have a tone or sound source of its own, but creates sound from the space in which it is placed. Since the tone changes according to the place and the time, no two sounds are exactly the same. It is an instrument to enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime encounter with the sound created at that place and moment. A walkway you are accustomed to walking on, a club where people move freely, or a quiet bamboo grove, each produces sounds that are unique to that place. There is a technique called improvisation, in which the music is played according to the situation of the place. This instrument creates improvisation in the sound itself, increasing its affinity with the space. By having the space, people and sound interfere with each other, we aim to create a spatial and musical experience as if we were merged into the space.

This work is an attempt to extract only the ambiguous surface layer of objects using 3D scanning technology. When an object is covered with a translucent shroud during 3D scanning, the result looks as if the surface of the object inside is stuck to the shroud.
This phenomenon would generally be regarded as a failure, since photogrammetric 3D scanning cannot accurately scan translucent objects. However, we evaluated it as a husk where the original substance has been lost and only the surface remains, and produced this work, considering it to be a new method of expression.
In this work, we created scanned data in the form of a "husk," and then materialized the data again to create an object with an ambiguous sense of presence, as if it might or might not exist.

The AI image generator mimics the image in the dataset, but may not be a perfect reproduction. Although areas in the image that failed to be generated show a peculiar distortion, there is a strange beauty to them. In this work, the AI was trained on the caustics patterns simulated by 3DCG software.
The AI generated images emitted from the projector are only the result of learning the caustics pattern as an image. The distortion of the light generated by the physical calculation is fused with the unique distortion created by the AI, resulting in an unnatural image that deviates from the laws of physics. However, this unnaturalness is also a proof of the AI intervention. I call this unnatural distortion as "AI-ness" in the image, and present it as an element of the image.

Interactive Afflatus is an audio/visual installation work by a human and an artificial intelligence.
The artificial intelligence generates in real time visual notations (images) that visually represent sounds. The human interprets the generated visual notations and actually plays the sounds. The sounds are then fed back to the artificial intelligence, which generates new visual notations. By repeating this process, an emergent expression is formed in which the human and the artificial intelligence give each other creative inspiration (afflatus). The aim is to present a form of co-creation between the two by blurring whether the subject of creativity in this performance is the human or the artificial intelligence.

"Miao Ge: Songs of the Hmong" was developed as a game that allows children of today to learn about the Hmong musical culture while having fun. In a simple and cute origami-style world, players explore the ancient Hmong literary work "Maple Songs". All the game music that can be enjoyed in the game is arranged from ancient Hmong melodies.
Miao (=苗), a Hmong girl, meets a mysterious old man in the forest who has lost his memory. He tells her that she needs to find the seed of a sacred tree in order to restore order to the world. Can Miao find the seed of the sacred tree?

"Whale Fall" is a single-player exploration game in which players control a variety of marine creatures as they travel through a spectacular ocean world. Everything from deep-sea creatures to schools of fish and to giant whales can be controlled by the player. After the whale's death, its body falls to the deep and silent ocean floor.
Countless lives are born from the whale's body, building a community of living creatures. This is the whalebone community "Whale Fall. The player is born as a small life form in the whalebone community. The player manipulates a variety of organisms from the deep and silent seafloor, and travels to the rich and vast ocean of life. Through the story, players experience the magnificent cycle of life in the ocean.

In our relationship with tools, such as bicycles and pianos, people can change to suit the tools. Convenient things that can be used at a glance are all around us, but there must also be many things made possible by people's mastery.
"Grasp" is defined as the way people interact with things when they try to somehow grasp a sense of their bodies while being conscious of each act, and through this process, a new physicality is achieved in this work, "Grasp(er)". In the screen, the hand is replaced by a completely different structure. At first, the viewer feels frustrated in using the hand, but gradually "gets the hang of it" and experiences a gradual change in his or her own physicality.

time event<5 frames> is a framework for a performance that aims to reconstruct the concept of time.
The spatially arranged displays act as peepholes through which one can glimpse the worlds that unfold beyond. The performers move the displays earnestly with no purpose. The projected images are a translation of the concept of time that has been overturned by modern physics. How will our lives be transformed when we accept the reconstructed concept of time?

I created this work with the idea that information is a wave, just as light and sound are. It is because it spreads from small triggers, constantly changes and heaves, and sometimes creates large movements. Especially in this Internet society, information is becoming more and more powerful. Even though it has no substance, it is a stormy wave that rapidly spreads across the boundary between the digital and the real worlds, and affects us all. In this work, viewers can move their smartphones and experience the waves they create. The small movements of the hand through the smartphone ripple through the simulation in the digital space, creating a huge result in the form of a wave that overwhelms us, thereby expressing the interactive nature of information and humans.