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October 1, 2026
Hitoshi Morita, founder and director at MULTRA in Tokyo, just sent us his new personal project, a one-man exquisite corpse-style compilation of sixty connected short clips produced daily over the course of two months.
Hitoshi Morita: Shiritori is a Japanese word game in which each word has to begin with the last sound of the one before. I wanted to play it with motion instead of words: sixty clips, posted on Instagram over sixty days, each one beginning with the last two seconds of the one before.
“Shiritori is a Japanese word game in which each word has to begin with the last sound of the one before. I wanted to play it with motion instead of words.”
The audio came first. I wrote two minutes of music as one continuous piece, then animated to it two seconds at a time. I started out storyboarding the chain, but the clips kept drifting from the boards, so I stopped drawing them and began improvising from wherever the previous clip ended.
To keep the joins from feeling stitched together, I sometimes roughed out a longer stretch as a single scene with only the camera move in place, then broke it apart into two-second pieces.
Because the film grew a little at a time, the second half brought its own challenge: avoiding ideas I had already used, and keeping the flow of the picture from settling into a single tempo. It was made in Cinema 4D and After Effects at 15fps, with textures added in After Effects.
Director/animator: Hitoshi Morita
Music/sound design: Hitoshi Morita
Toolkit: Cinema 4D, After Effects
