“Wait—did we even do anything summery this year?”
That realization became the starting point for “Sore Natsu Jan.” No trip to the sea, no festival, and the yukata still sitting in the closet. If summer has passed us by, why not start now and try everything at once? The song takes off from that casual question.
If there are no summer plans, make them inside a song
The photo folder is full of nothing but cats. Still, summer can begin with a convenience-store meetup, a bicycle ride, cheap water pistols and handheld fireworks. I filled the lyrics with the momentum of friends running outside before they have time to make a proper plan.
The music is built around J-Pop, with the bounce of Jersey Club and a light hyperpop touch. I wanted the chorus—“Beach! Fireworks! Watermelon! Youth!”—to feel instantly singable: a lively idol song that lifts your mood even a little.
I had made cheerful idol songs before, but this was my first time creating a full music video around a fixed group of members and presenting them as one consistent unit.
Keeping the same three girls on screen
When generating several scenes with AI, faces and hairstyles can shift from image to image. A new camera angle can suddenly change the outfits or even the setting. Because I had previously worked mainly with Midjourney, expanding the world of a video while keeping its characters recognizable had remained a difficult problem.
For this project, I experimented with attaching reference images in ChatGPT Image and carrying the three members’ hair colors, clothes and overall personalities into each new image.
The short pink hair, long black hair and brown ponytail give each member a clear color and silhouette. Even when the scene changes, I wanted the viewer to immediately recognize the same three girls. Their faces and smaller details still drift slightly between shots, but I think they hold together more convincingly as an idol unit than in my earlier attempts.
At first, I liked the crisp outlines and pop-art energy of the original character designs, and I hoped to keep that direction while adding more scenes. Yet as I generated one image after another from references, the later designs somehow developed softer faces and linework, while the clothes moved closer to stage costumes.
A reference image does not freeze every detail. A small variation in one image can become a new defining feature in the next. Deciding how much change could be accepted as personality, while still keeping the group recognizable, became part of the production process.
The difficulty of making dance follow music
The dance scenes brought another challenge.
Seedance can create lively, energetic movement, but each attempt also carries a token cost. And if I want a character to perform a precise sequence, a written prompt alone is not enough. It may require filming a dance reference—or, for a more serious approach, building the characters and their movement in software such as Blender.
That remains a challenge I would like to take on someday.
For now, I chose the strongest movements I could generate and used editing to bring them closer to the track. The choreography in the choruses is not completely consistent, but I tried to align poses and cuts with calls such as “Beach! Fireworks! Watermelon! Youth!” and the dance break’s “Right! Left! Pose!”
It does not have to be perfect to count as summer
The song says that things do not need to be perfect, and that the mistakes are often what make us laugh later.
The small shifts in the characters and the choreography that does not connect perfectly are also a record of trying to make the most joyful video I could with the tools I have now. In that sense, the process of making this MV may reflect the song itself.
It began with the thought that I had not done anything summery that year. By the end, making the song and its video had itself become one of my memories of summer.
There is something genuinely positive about a fun idol song. Even without a perfect plan—and even when things do not go exactly as intended—being able to laugh at the end can move us forward. I would like to keep making songs that bring that kind of brightness to the people who hear them.
J-pop / Jersey Club / hyperpop-liteそれ夏じゃんOpen the song page for audio, lyrics, and notes.Explore this song →Thank you for reading.
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