Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview at Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura, partner at creative agency PARTY, explains the process behind a television commercial he made featuring dancing sperm.
Kawamura describes how he was approached by a Japanese music television company called Space Shower TV to produce a commercial for their Music Saves Tomorrow campaign, a response to the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in 2011. "There were a couple of other directors working on it and they were doing very serious, dramatic, emotional commercials," Kawamura explains. "But I wanted to do something more fun, just to bring back the smiles to the people."
All Kawamura had to work with was the Music Saves Tomorrow tagline. "For me, 'tomorrow' meant the next generation and the children, but I didn't want to show kids in a TV commercial," he says. "So I was thinking if there was any other way to visualise these seeds of tomorrow and I thought, well, what if I went a step further and not show kids but show sperm?"
In the 60-second commercial that Kawamura came up with, animated sperm dance in formation to music. Kawamura describes the unusual lengths he and his team went to to create it. "We looked around and there was an all-male crew, so we decided to collect our sperm and bring it to a bio lab," he says. "We scanned it and motion-captured our sperm and used that data to create the animations. I think nobody else has done that in history."
Watch the full commercial here.
This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.
The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine's music on Dezeen Music Project.
See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.
