The Uniqlo UT Store in Tokyo's Shibuya district gets the 'tilt-shift' treatment for Uniqlo Calendar.

A year after Uniqlo's Uniqlock blog widget became the talk of the award show circuit, Tokyo-based creative shop Projector has released the follow-up to the Titanium Grand Prix-winning campaign: an equally stylish Calendar tool designed to evolve with your seasonal wardrobe.

Much like the Uniqlock widget, which told time with an hourly chime and video clips of synchronized dancers, Uniqlo Calendar presents e-commerce as both entertainment and utility. It can be downloaded as a screensaver, embedded on a blog or viewed via a microsite.

Whereas Uniqlock's dancers suggested appropriate clothing depending on the time of day, the Calendar helps the Japanese retailer's online customers dress for the season ahead.

"Everybody feels the weather and the season from the scenery, and fashion is related to these feelings," says Projector co-founder/creative director Koichiro Tanaka. "So, we thought it would work as Uniqlo's next approach to unite the clothes and the scenery."

The Calendar displays stop-motion scenes of modern-day Japan captured using a "tilt-shift" photographic technique that gives the cityscapes a miniature, handmade feeling. When a user clicks on the video sequence, a mosaic of Uniqlo products appears with the color of the clothing corresponding to the imagery's evolving seasonal palette.

The charming aesthetic aside, Tanaka chose to use ‘tilt-shift' to save on production costs. The photographs were shot using a digital Canon 5D Mark II camera and no lighting or complicated set-ups were required. "The only thing we needed to shoot is time and passion," he says.

The photographs were taken by a team of freelance photographers working through production company Puzzle, Inc. and the Calendar interface design was done by spfdesign's Takashi Kamada. Projector also reunited with Fantastic Plastic Machine producer/Uniqlock chime composer Tomoyuki Tanaka to score the classically-inspired soundtrack.

The Calendar will be updated with new music every two months and feature a different sound artist in collaboration with Fantastic Plastic Machine. The first guest player is experimental saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu.

"This is also a music project, which will be completed in a year or more," explains Tanaka. "Fantastic Plastic Machine deeply understands how sound affects imagery. We came up with the idea of creating a modern remix of classical music. We thought it would fit with the nostalgic and modern Japanese scenes."

www.uniqlo.com/calendar

www.projector.jp

spfdesign.com