PERFECT DAYS

Taking the words of Takuma Takasaki — who co-wrote the film’s screenplay and is also the creative director of this website — “perhaps the film, too, was just one means of accessing the person called Hirayama,” the web also tried to approach the protagonist in its own way. The essence of the person Hirayama lies in his daily “routine.” In the film itself, the story is built solely on an accumulation of small undulations within that quiet repetition, and yet a great emotion wells up in the viewer at the end. We decided to express that essence on the web as well. It would be meaningless unless visitors here come to feel “I want to see this film.” Born from the idea of content that can be enjoyed both before and after watching the film was the original novel “Days of Hirayama,” written specially by Takasaki. By chronicling the 353 of the year’s 365 days that the film did not depict, we thought we could portray the depths of his consciousness invisible in the film, and the something reflected in his eyes, within the repetition of Hirayama’s ordinary days — making the film a richer experience.

In “Days of Hirayama,” the very act of scrolling the page is converted into a story experience. In step with the progress of the text shown on screen, 117 environmental sounds — finely tuned based on the film’s sound materials — are naturally mixed and played: the sound of sweeping the street with a bamboo broom, the cawing of crows, the sound of rain, the presence of a car running in the distance. From a state where only text flows over a faintly lit black background, the composition shifts, through the user’s actions, to one where visuals capturing dappled sunlight overlap with the text. This is meant to show on screen “the scenery he was looking at, or is assumed to have photographed,” taking as a cue the way Hirayama in the film occasionally turns his own camera. By layering sound, text, on-screen changes, and operation, the gaze that had been reading the story from the outside gradually draws closer to Hirayama’s viewpoint as he gazes at the scenery. That gentle transition itself is intended to remain in the reader’s memory.

Treating characters not as mere information but as “forms you can touch,” we staged them so that each is drawn stroke by stroke in the correct stroke order. For this, we developed a dedicated tool that turns the trajectory of each character into data, and by managing it as a sprite sheet, we made living character movement possible. We also created a tool that lets you finely adjust character spacing in the browser. We applied kerning to all characters in headings and body text, arranging even the position of punctuation and the spacing between characters.