ME:I – MUSE, music video behind the scenes

This Sunday, ME:I’s official YouTube channel published the behind-the-scenes video for the group’s new single, MUSE. The video, just over 16 minutes long, is entertaining and reveals several interesting aspects of the filming process for the music video.

ME:I (ミーアイ) ⊹ ‘MUSE’ MV Behind

The first scene in the BTS is my favorite: the punk band segment featuring Ran, Rinon, Shizuku, and Kokona with their retro televisions. They’re wearing the same outfits as in the dance scene at the Shibuya crossing, which follows immediately after in the making-of video.

Then we see the scene with Keiko, Ayane, Shizuku, and Kokona calling the cat. This comes right before the scene where the cat runs away, featuring Rinon, Suzu, Shizuku, and Ran. At first, I assumed the same four girls appeared in both scenes, but only Shizuku is in both groups.

Next come the scenes in the drawer-like set, which I initially thought was created with CGI. But no—it turns out everything was built physically: the giant phone, the cable, the headphones. They look amazing on camera, and even behind the scenes, they still look too real to be props.

Also, Cocoro looks great.

My oshi, Momona.

There’s a glimpse of the sunset scene’s set, which looks like a giant miniature model. It reminded me of the terrain Johnny Fraser-Allen from Weta Workshop built for his Dungeons & Dragons game. I’d love to own a terrain piece like that to fill with miniatures.

Up to this point, the only visible part of the set was the phone. It’s in the dance scene that we see the rest of the drawer—complete with props like pearls on the wall and a CD on the floor. None of this was done with CGI. I would’ve thought at least the pearl background was a green screen effect, because it doesn’t show much depth in the final MV. But I guess dance scenes are hard to composite digitally, and physical sets just work better.