Archipel | entry two
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 only gathers selected moments from many stories and encounters, but 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.
Laying down the path to Archipel
In our first entry, we mentioned what led us to the creation of this Medium, and extendedly discussed the case of our documentary Ebb and Flow.
One goal for this Medium is to share more background on all of our channel, which went through a certain number of changes, small and big, especially since we decided to become Archipel and started to publish more diverse content over 2018. However, we want to start the story for this post a couple of years before that change. Back then, the channel was still named toco toco tv.
toco toco was our sole piece of content, running twice a month. In parallel to YouTube, it was also being aired on a now defunct French TV channel (more on this in a later post), it was an overall lighter format that would include an opening, a narration in French at the beginning of each episode, flashy colors or animated transitions.
Although we were still a relatively new YouTube channel, we had the chance to cover artists such as Shichiro Kobayashi, a background artist legend who worked on Nobody’s boy: Remi, Angel’s Egg or Revolutionary Girl Utena (also our most senior guest in the series to this day), or Kenji Kawai, the renown composer whose works include the soundtracks of Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, Ranma 1/2 (among many others). Along the way, we also did our first episode with a game creator, Swery, who we followed in his hometown of Osaka before heading over together for a drinking marathon (whose only goal was of course to contribute to the creation of the episode, nothing more). Besides our first discovery of the universe of game creators, this episode represented other “firsts” for the toco toco series.
First time shooting out of Tokyo. First time making a “long” episode (back then the average duration of an episode would be around the 10-minute mark, where this time we stood at 18 minutes). First time we felt a strong reaction from the community.
Obviously, that last part is what marked our minds the most, looking at the positive comments on social media, or waking up in the morning to see our episode featured on larger media. Gaming is a theme that we hold a passion for, and that people seemed to enjoy back; it is safe to say that this specific episode opened up new perspectives for us in terms of content.
In the summer of 2016, we decided to move forward with an idea that had been running in our minds for a while: being that toco toco could become more than a “show” and something closer to a short documentary series. No more narration from us, but instead the guests could become the ones to tell their stories, opening up on their universe and offering an introspective view on their work.
We thought of undergoing that transition through a “summer special”, solely centered around game creators. To that end, we directly discussed with three game companies, who agreed to open the doors to their development floors, ultimately resulting in our episodes on SUDA51, Daisuke Ishiwatari (offering us a rare video opportunity) and Keiichiro Toyama.
Shifting towards that revamped format was the biggest change since the creation of the channel, it felt as if it was the beginning of something new. New identity, new tone, new feel, and above anything else, going closer to what we wanted to make.
We admit that there are a few things we wanted to polish more. However, this new format served as a base for us, a base that progressively evolved with each episode.
As we reflect back on the evolution of the series, we can’t help but notice the impact that game-themed episodes had on our approach, as if they were a catalyst that helped us take new leaps forward.
Walking down the tracks of the locations that inspired Katsura Hashino’s Persona 5, following Yoko Taro at the dawn of the release of NieR: Automata (and in a funny, and slightly awkward, unplanned bathtub scene), listening to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s pursuit of interactive experiences. One way or another, each of these episodes participated in the evolution of toco toco, either by providing a boost to the channel’s visibility (including our first feature on The Verge, subsequently picked up by Japan’s GIGAZINE) or by triggering a more polished approach in our content (such as the disappearance of the grey bars used to indicate guest names and locations which were bugging us, shifting towards a more simple style starting from the Tetsuya Mizuguchi episode).
toco toco obviously goes beyond the scope of gaming. Its concept was made to shed light on creatives from all fields, which led to some memorable encounters.
An artist whose universe would only revolve around the yellow color, to the point of trying as much as possible to only eat yellow dishes. Accessory or fashion designers, who made us discover hidden concept boutiques in Tokyo (with the added challenge of not showing the face of the latter). A media artist merging humanoid robots to buddhist traditions, or a musician who performed in front of us using an electric fan connected to an amp. This is just to cite a few, which is itself a small fraction of the local creative energy we can see here and that we wanted to share.
The emerging isles
In September 2017, we took another decision for the series in reducing the pace from two to one episode per month, starting from mangaka Hisashi Eguchi onwards. The workload on each episode had increased, making it hard to keep up with a bimonthly rhythm while keeping a stable level of quality and time to work our side jobs.
We also wanted to be able to think of new projects that could help us tell new stories.
This is how a few months later, at the beginning of 2018, we had started on a longer project (which became Ebb and Flow) and on a new concept, named “New Territories”, an experimental journal following a French artist on a series of artistic residencies throughout Japan, which had originally started on Vimeo. As we were working on these new ideas, we felt it was time to do a complete change of identity on our channel in order to centralize that content on YouTube. Simply put, the channel couldn’t be named toco toco tv anymore.
The change came in March 2018, when we renamed our channel Archipel (the French word for “Archipelago”, more on that in a bit). Admittedly, the tweet above might be slightly misleading as we mention a “new unified channel”, whereas it is in fact the same channel with the same small team, where we simply wanted to do more.
However, our original intent was to go a step further than a simple name change (and please bear with us for this one).
We thought of Archipel as an alternate universe of its own, a collection of isles representing the ecosystem of our past, present or future content. We started to reflect on this world’s lore, working together with an illustrator on imagery concepts to represent it.
An isle emerging, deserted at first sight, but the silhouette of two mysterious buildings discernible in the horizon. One of them has an odd spherical shape, footsteps leading to its door, while the other is a sharper tower-shaped building, surrounded by a collection of art pieces. A representation of toco toco and New Territories.
Another key element we thought of is a lighthouse. Its key function is to show Archipel’s content to the outside world. On the other side, people who see that content can subscribe to the channel and be able to populate the isles.
But for the sake of this post, we will only share this tiny fraction of what we had in mind for that world. Unfortunately, we never got to really put the concept on track, mostly due to a lack of time.
Okay, just a bit more. There is a second isle, that emerged from a collaboration with another illustrator.
Part of the idea that led to the concept for this second formation comes from a few conversations we had, where we were told by some Japanese people that our content was a way to archive the work and profiles of Japan’s creators.
That word, “archive”, it somehow resonated with us.
It could be an actual building holding its place on Archipel, an archive that stored all of our content, small pieces made to document Japan’s creativity.
We thought of pursuing the story of Archipel in manga form, following a character, a guardian of the yet unpopulated isles. He wanders through an archive, browsing through its records. Heading out of the edifice, he waits for the high tide, the only way to create a passage to the other isle, in order to reach his destination: a lighthouse. All the way up in the light room, his head becomes the mechanism that triggers the emission of the archive’s content to the outside world.
The guardian has a name: Leto.
Partly playing with the Japanese word for archipelago, rettō, we also liked its mythological meaning, a goddess who had to find refuge on an island in order to give birth. More than a guardian, we see Leto more as a guide in Archipel, in addition to being the initial archivist.
Until now we had only shared a few pages of the manga, or used some parts of it in our YouTube channel’s identity. However, this is an abstract of the original idea we had for it, and writing about it now makes us slightly regret that we didn’t make it evolve further.
Sadly, we just couldn’t.
We now probably diverged a bit from explaining the flow of content that lead us to Archipel. But looking back, that single name change on the channel allowed us to dramatically increase our range of possibilities into launching diverse content.
First, we rallied some of our New Territories content on Archipel, starting by the artist’s first residency on Sado Island. We also added a memory of the Yosakoi festival held in Kochi prefecture (shot back in the Summer of 2017), which was originally made as an “interlude” linked to another video, an encounter with the heirs of a 150-year old tradition in paper making (not featured on the channel, but still viewable on Vimeo). In a similar manner, another “interlude”, Taxi Talk, was added to Archipel later on —an impromptu originating from a cab ride taken during the shoot of another video.
The videos from the New Territories series are dramatically different in terms of approach to what we had ever done on toco toco before, to the point where there are some people who are surprised when we tell them it is the same team behind them. Posting them was more spontaneous as well, the interludes were dropped on the channel on the spur of the moment, just as how they were made in the first place. We also took the additional freedom of deciding that some content wouldn’t make the jump to YouTube. The series ultimately led to another documented residency published last January, this time on Iki island.
Of course, New Territories comes in addition to all the content we got to publish from 2018 onwards, which we want to talk about in further details in our next Medium post.
But as a closing word to this article, there are times where we can’t help but wonder how the channel would have evolved had we sticked to only creating toco toco and if we never did the change to Archipel.
Was it a better option to keep a single piece of content, with a clear concept?
We surely wouldn’t be where we’re standing now, for better or… worse.
-the Archipel team
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