"Star Agate" I made an original anime MV with AI! #Agate #JapaneseStyle #Yokai #Sun

Good evening, this is Kurono!
I've been working hard on an MV, and it's finally finished and posted to YouTube 🎵

The theme is "Agate x Sunrise x Japanese Style".
I visited Kyoto in early January, so I included scenes inspired by my favorite spots there!
It's an MV with a story, so I hope you enjoy the world-building ✨
(Is it a little bit horror-like...?)

◆ Tools Used

Illustration Creation: Nano Banana Pro (Leonardo.Ai)
Illustration Adjustment: CLIP STUDIO PAINT
Animation: Vidu AI
Music: Suno AI
Music Adjustment: Studio One
Video Editing: Filmora

◆ SOHEKI NO KANNAGI

In the gaps of everyday life, there are moments when shadows of a different color fall.
The sound of a bell rings—the boundary between this world and the spirit world... it's unraveling again today...
Twin girls, "Sora Kannagi" and "Miu Kannagi." Today, they step into the "other side" once again to fight against the black yokai.

The beginning of everything was a single prayer.
A prayer offered by a shrine maiden, once hailed as the strongest, to protect this capital.
However, no one with the same power ever appeared again, and the prayer eventually became distorted.
This is a story that traces the reason why the prayer turned into a curse, and then, unravels that curse...

💎A rough flow of the MV's story
It starts with a scene of Sora and Miu watching the first sunrise of the year.

The flow is that they were called into another world while eating their way through town on the way home.

As members of the "Cursed Twin Shrine Maidens" lineage, the two have been troubled by various yokai since they were young.

・Miu → Could see them from the start. She couldn't do anything when she was little, but after training, she can now use exorcism techniques.
・Sora → Could feel them but was at a level where she couldn't see them. She had strong spiritual power and the ability to repel them. This time, she received power from the White Fox deity, allowing her to see them and use techniques.
...That is the setting.

― Scorched by the sun, the thorns are cast aside, a thistle.
I'll explain the meaning another time...
Everything around has color, but only the thistle is gray.
Since I made it gray, please consider it something different from a real-world thistle.

Besides the twins, there are others fighting the black yokai.

He is Seki. He is not human, but a crow tengu in training.
He is a boy who stays with the tengu of the mountain where Miu trains, and he has been tasked with watching over the two.
He likes dango. (In the MV, he received some from the two.)
I love Mount Kurama and wanted to include a tengu character, so Seki was born ✨

She is Hana. She is a shrine maiden at a different shrine than the two and is friends with the twins.
She is skilled at techniques that fire arrows of phoenix fire.
She is a character born from the image of the Suzaku amulet of Jonangu Shrine 🔥

Once they defeat a certain amount of black yokai in the other world, they suddenly return to the real world.
That's why Sora and Hana have surprised expressions.

The end is a flurry of character scenes...!
(I wanted to show them a little more slowly...)

They are subordinates of Lady Haku, the white fox, and watch over the two of them at the shrine where Sora and Mimi live.

The son of the Dragon God who governs water.
By the way, the flowers blooming at the base of the tree are Saxifraga stolonifera.
They bloom at the inner shrine of Kifune Shrine, and I thought they were so cute that I absolutely had to include them, and the AI managed to put them in properly.
I tried inputting a reference image of the Saxifraga stolonifera I took myself, and it actually worked quite well... (Amazing...)

The "Twin Blue" in the "Twin Blue Shrine Maidens" of this story represents the blue of the sky and the sea.
The image color for Sora is aquamarine (and morganite)... representing the sea, and for Mimi, it's labradorite... representing the night sky. Each is the opposite of their name, giving the feeling that the sea and sky are paired.

I was torn between different kanji for "blue" (ao), but I chose "碧" (heki/blue-green) because the character itself contains a sense of beauty, and it also contains the character for "stone" (ishi).

◆ A few words from the creator

The "Agate" in "Star Agate" means agate (menou). Since it has the character for "horse" in it and it's the Year of the Horse, I thought it was perfect, so I made agate the theme!

Also, agate is a "stone formed by the gathering of small quartz crystals." I think the image of many lights gathering together feels like the collection of everyone's wishes placed upon the sunrise.
(Actually, I wanted to upload this in January, haha)
Agate also sounds a bit like the English phrase "Start at the Gate," so I put that in the lyrics.
By the way, the stones that appear here and there are meant to be fire agates. (Though the colors are slightly different...)

The part I was most happy with was the battle scene!!
I used Vidu Q2's [Reference to Video] feature and kept rolling the dice, and I think I managed to create something with a fair amount of impact.
However, fast animations do tend to make the art fall apart a bit...
I might be able to make something even better if I use Vidu Q3, so I'll try various things in the works I create from here on out 😊
Thanks to Q3, I feel like I'm finally getting closer to being able to continue the Jewel Fairy Tale series...!

◆ In closing

At first, I thought, "I'll make an MV with a beautiful Japanese pattern theme!" but when it was finished, it turned out completely different, haha.
I couldn't stop my delusions of wanting to add this character, or that character, or needing this character for that scene... 😆

I hope I can turn this into an anime too, but I want to start working on the Jewel Fairy Tale next, so maybe someday...!!

I was so sleepy in January that I couldn't do anything at all, which is a shame... 😭
Every day, I would crawl into bed as soon as I finished work.
I thought that maybe I was actually unwell since I was so sleepy, but since I was fine other than being sleepy, I'm sure I must have been half-hibernating.

It's still cold, so I'm sleepy and can't create with the same momentum I had around December, but I'll take it slow and easy 😊✨