Archipel | entry three
We are a two-people team running Archipel, a YouTube channel where we create documentary content centered around Japanese artists and creatives, in addition to capturing some pieces of Japanese culture. This Medium gathers selected moments from many stories and encounters, as we plan to share more insights about our work, the path that led to where we are today and to the direction we decide to take for the future, in addition to our overall feeling in the process.
Enlarging Archipel’s spectrum of content
In this entry, we will cover more details about the content we have created since last year. After the transition to Archipel, we doubled our efforts in our content, also marking a shift in the balance with our side jobs, as we started to limit or decline some projects in order to dedicate more time to the channel. We were seeing a better purpose in what we were making, through that vision of building an archive capturing records of Japan’s artists, creatives, as well as fragments of Japanese culture.
Around this time last year, on the day we published Ebb and Flow (more on that in our first entry), we headed over to Kyoto for a work project during BitSummit, an event centered around indie game creators. With some time left on our hands, we thought we could shoot something of our own. We took out the camera and started to film during the event, meeting some old friends along the way.
Shifting to Archipel had allowed us to be more spontaneous in our content launches, this “slow memory” being just a small example of how we could leverage that newly acquired freedom. Interestingly enough, we are in the midst of preparing to head to this year’s edition of BitSummit as we are writing these words.
Creator portraits: toco toco, without the places
A few months before, we were also working on something new on the side, as we had started to talk to Atlus on following Katsura Hashino’s newly founded Studio Zero, all the way towards the creation of Project Re: Fantasy, his awaited new game. It turns out we were also a bit too early for Project Re: Fantasy. At the time, the development floor was actively working on Catherine: Full Body, a renewed version of the 2011 title.
Following a studio through the making of a game had been a long-time objective of ours; we wanted to be present for each development milestones leading up to the release, capture moments of interaction between the staff, in addition to creating portraits of the key people involved. One of the first shooting sessions was following Katsura Hashino at the first edition of EVO Japan, rallying the local vs. fighting game community, where a special Catherine tournament using the game’s battle mode was being held.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to proceed with the long-term follow, as the studio was running full throttle in development. Ultimately, we shifted to the creation of a portrait of another key person we wanted to follow, Atlus lead character designer and illustrator Shigenori Soejima, who shared us his creative insights.
It was the first time we were making a creator portrait outside of toco toco’s scope for the channel, where we didn’t solely pursue Soejima’s universe, but also adding his perspective on his work on the Catherine series and the creation of its new character.
During that period, we were pursuing on the making of another creator portrait, this time with illustrator legend Katsuya Terada. As long-time admirers of his work, we had approached Terada in the past for toco toco, however he openly told us he didn’t have any places to introduce, a recurring issue we have been confronted to in the series.
Therefore, the ball was in our hands to find another way. It did take some time, but we managed to find it.
We pitched the idea of organizing a live drawing on Iki island, in Nagasaki prefecture, through some people we knew. The immediate next step was to draft a rather sudden proposal to Katsuya Terada asking him if he would be interested in spending four days with us on a remote island for that live drawing session, which we would be documenting. It was one of those rare times where everyone’s schedule was perfectly matching. So just like that, he accepted our offer.
We set up to meet at the airport a few weeks laters, one plane and one boat ride away from the island. To be fully honest, we were jokingly wondering if he would actually show up, but Terada appeared in front of us at the rendezvous point, right on time.
We had done our share of preparation towards this shoot. Beforehand, the people who helped us for this project told us there would be plenty of locations where we could set up the surface for the live drawing. Ultimately, the amount of improvisation we had to do on location probably deserves its own Medium post.
We went on to explore various places, which were possible options for the shoot, it was also a first contact with the island that would help Katsuya Terada in his inspiration to create his artwork. Our options ended up being quite limited, but ultimately we set a folding screen in a creek by the sea, which became our base camp for the live drawing. Eventually, handling the summer heat (and the abundant insect life that came along with it) became an issue, so the folding screen canvas made it to our hotel room, before we finally set it up on a beach after the drawing was finished.
Each night, we would go with Terada for dinner and drinks, learning more about him and on his stories with some other widely known creators, discovering more about his character. It was an overall challenging four days for us, but it probably remains one of our best shoot memories.
Shoku: a false start to a kitchen relay
At this point, you’re probably thinking that the diverse content we had been pursuing with Archipel led us in covering a lot of pop culture. Although it certainly is a field that we enjoy evolving in, we wanted to go beyond it, which led us to trying to accomplish another hidden objective we had; creating a documentary series around food, although the field was already heavily covered (Eater, Munchies, etc.).
Far away from game studios, we went on to shoot in the blazing ramen kitchens of Tomoharu Shono, a “ramen creator” pursuing the “bowl of tomorrow”, adding in gastronomic aspects to his ramen recipes.
The original concept for Shoku as a series was to have each chef introduce a restaurant that they liked, which would then become the subject of the following episode. The good responses we had on this “pilot” were also motivating us to keep going. However, we were also being reminded that our resources were limited. Adding another regular series at that point was probably trying to bite more than we could chew. Pun intended.
Shoku has sadly not seen the light of day as a series yet, it is still a one-shot episode (that doesn’t introduce the intended concept) but we are hopeful that we’ll make an episode two someday.
The Indian summer
September meant that the Tokyo Game Show was right around the corner. It involved some work projects for us as well, but like with BitSummit, we used the spare time we had to catch up with some friends in a series of “TGS encounters”, meeting with Swery to discuss The Missing, Yasuhiro Kitao from FromSoftware to talk Sekiro, in addition to a first encounter with the Motion Twin team who told us more about the story of Dead Cells, which also became our first video fully featured in French (with English and Japanese subtitles) on the channel.
These encounters led the way to one of our more recent content, named Cutscenes, where we discuss around drinks with various people working in Japan’s game industry, made in a shorter, “rawer” format. Well, the truth is we had also received requests from the community asking us to do more drinking with game creators, so we felt we had to answer that demand.
After a full three days on the Tokyo Game Show venue (including a public day, which should count for a lot more), we headed over to the eastern end of Chiba prefecture to shoot the Choshi Marina Triathlon, as part of our toco toco episode with MAX Watanabe. It was a rather different four days than the ones spent on Iki a month before, but just as intense.
The result is that last October alone, we published a total of five videos on Archipel. The last one of them was Binary Skin, a documentary we created to cover the growing movement of Virtual YouTubers in Japan. We had first heard about the subject in June, when we met with some friends over at Maker’s Fund who gave us access to a leading company in the field.
It was our first (and so far only) opportunity to interview a monitor, as we discussed with “Vtuber” pioneer Kizuna AI on the topic of avatars and virtual identities. We shot this documentary through multiple sessions over the course of four months, slowly discovering this next medium in digital entertainment, through the perspectives of a journalist, a scientist, an active fan in the community, in addition to the founder of Activ8, the company producing Kizuna AI.
Mixing Terrace House and Ugly Delicious
Around the end of the year, we released Hidengen, a short series following the board game scene in Japan. The original idea we had for this was “a mix of Terrace House and Ugly Delicious, on the theme of board games in Japan” — we are under the impression that nobody had come up with that before, but if it isn’t the case, we would really like to meet.
It was our first content featuring a MC, where game designer and illustrator YACOYON guided us through a scene that was still unknown to us. We made two episodes of the series, one about board game cafes, whose number is exponentially growing in Japan, while we centered the other on board game makers, following three different actors of the local scene. The series only received a low number of reactions, however it was again an occasion for us to discover a new field and try yet another approach.
We were planning on a third episode, this time on the theme of tabletop role-playing games in Japan, which is quite different from what we are used to in the West from what we’ve heard — however we put that project on hold for the time being.
What if?
Regularity through toco toco, spontaneity and exploration through our other content. There’s a lot we managed to create in those past 18 months, which led to meeting some incredible people and acquire knowledge in new fields.
This year, we also tried adding more freedom to toco toco as well, for example in making the longest episode that we ever featured on Archipel, a “special” featuring Capcom directors Hideaki Itsuno (Devil May Cry 5) and the pair Yasuhiro Anpo & Kazunori Kadoi (Resident Evil 2: Remake). Without going into all the details, our longest toco toco was also the most painful to make, for reasons that go beyond the scope of regular video production.
Looking back, it was stimulating to be able to shift between all those different fields, going beyond the scope of toco toco, although it also felt as a constant reminder of some of the limitations we had.
However, there is a multiplication of things leading to certain decisions that we have made, which we will follow up on in our next entry. So far on this Medium, we covered a lot of the in-between, without going over our very beginnings, nor on how some things are set to come to an end.
-the Archipel team
