Mitsui Fudosan, a leading company in the Japanese real estate industry, sponsored “Kashiwa-no-ha Innovation Fes 2020” in Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City, Chiba Prefecture. Kashiwa-no-ha is a city where university research centers are neighbors with corporations, and daily conceive new ideas for city creation and business. This year the conference was online. In order to heighten brand awareness of the city and viewership, announcement posters were produced. The overall creative & production budget was 10 million yen. For about a month and a half – starting one month prior to the event and throughout the online conference, an announcement campaign of station posters and web movies mainly placed on SNS was executed.

At“Kashiwa-no-ha Innovation Fes 2020”, we wanted to visually capture “spark of inspiration in the researchers”, “passionate heat of new businesses”, and “power of innovation” in a movie and graphic posters: all those qualities invisible to the eye which make this city unique. When considering how to best express the intangibles of those qualities, and do it visually, we imagined that it must be something that would achieve differentiation from competitive conferences and have powerful visual impact – something hugely explosive like a fireworks display. The target of this message is business people who will be attracted by the Smart City concept and its creation of new industries. Since ancient times, fireworks hold both a historical and fortuitous meaning for the Japanese people. Together with the event theme of “EMPOWER POSSIBLE”, this explosive expressive also captured our hope to break minds and spirits free from the global confinement of the COVID-19

We decided to shoot an actual explosion. With the cooperation of a special effects company, we shot the explosion of a variety of explosive materials. A special camera with an ultrahigh resolution of 100 million pixels was used to shoot and faithfully capture the instant of the explosion. No computer graphics were used. Nothing was edited out nor edited in. Sharpness was adjusted to bring out the trajectory of the light, and produced light trails such as we had never seen before. The result was something that only a photograph could capture and could not be created by computer graphics or other contrived images.

The message was successfully communicated to the target as envisaged and achieved the desired aims. The online symposium viewers totaled 7,000; website traffic recorded 200,000 visitors in a month; and over 90% of the event participants express a favorable response to the communication and creative according to a post-event questionnaire. In addition, awareness of the Smart City of Kashiwa-no-ha locates away from Tokyo was secured.