Nicola Cruz – Okami (Official Music Video)

By Motomichi Nakamura

Vinyl/CD/Download/Stream: nicolacruz.lnk.to/siku

From Nicola

Okami was created with Juan Posso, a percussionist who I’ve worked with before and admire. The idea is to use chromatic percussion (in this case, the vibraphone) to represent melody, inspired by trips to Japan and the figure of the wolf, an animal I’ve always related to.

Okami fue creado junto con Juan Posso, percusionista con el que he trabajado antes y admiro. La idea era usar percusión cromática (en este caso el vibráfono) para representar melodía, inspirada en viajes a Japón, y en la figura del lobo, animal con el que siempre me he sentido relacionado.

From Motomichi

Synopsis:

It’s a story about a lonely and scared boy locked in his small room. Being inspired by Okami (wolf), he goes on a journey to explore the world outside to find the strength in himself to overcome his fear. It’s an experimental animation with Projection Mapping and 2D animation techniques. All the outdoor scenes were filmed in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
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The idea is that when the boy decides to step outside of his room the scenery literary switched to outdoor in which I filmed the projected animations on to buildings (by using Projection Mapping techniques) in Red Hook. At the final scene you can see the statue of liberty behind.

The backstory is that I spent three nights to shoot the outdoor clips and one of the nights, which I spent about 3 hours outdoor, happened to be one of the coldest in the year in New York and it was -10°C (14°F ) and because of the extremely strong wind it felt like -20°C. I thought I was going to die, ha ha.

So far the film has been selected for official screening of Pictoplasma 2019 and Honorable and Official screening of Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (SICAF) 2019