REFERENCE ROLES
@ {{Mixed 1}} — the WOMAN: face, hair, makeup, outfit. Ignore its white background, lookbook pose, studio light and framing; camera, posing, expression and light come from the shots below.
@ {{Mixed 2}} — MOCHI the capybara: body shape, fur colour and texture, face. Ignore its grey background and take no scale from it — his size is set per timecode below and changes twice.
@ {{Mixed 3}} — the REMOTE: shape, yellowed plastic, worn keypad, oversized red button. Ignore its background and inset hand.
@ {{Mixed 4}} — OPENING LOCATION, a coin parking lot: geometry, surfaces, walls, vending machine, wheel stoppers, daylight. Ignore camera and framing. Do not widen, add buildings or upgrade it.
@ {{Mixed 5}} — COMPANY PARKING LOCATION, same terms: bays, office block, lobby steps, daylight.
WARDROBE
Exactly the outfit in @ {{Mixed 1}} , no part of it ever changing: cropped denim jacket with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, lavender ribbed crop camisole, low-rise denim micro miniskirt with a white belt, chunky white platform sneakers, small cream shoulder bag at her right hip, pearl choker, pink beaded bracelet on her left wrist, sunglasses pushed up on her head, lavender butterfly clip. Long straight dark brown hair, centre parted, two strands in front. Pink blush high on her cheeks and under her eyes, glossy lips.
LANGUAGE AND VOICE
Japanese only, lips precisely matching the pronunciation. Light, low-energy, matter-of-fact — the way you talk to a pet you see every morning. Exactly three lines are spoken out loud and four are inner voice-over, in the order below and no others. Her mouth moves only on the out-loud lines; on every inner voice-over her lips stay closed and still. Mochi never speaks and his mouth never syncs to any sound.
STYLE
Handheld documentary realism, a Japanese morning commute vlog, 35mm mirrorless: overcast daylight, no grading beyond a cool cast, real skin texture with visible pores, blush reading as makeup not a filter, real denim weight and fray, subtle grain, micro-shake and a half-beat of focus hunting. The absurd part is shot exactly as plainly as the ordinary part — no fantasy glow, no epic angles.
SETTING AND OBJECT REGISTER
Two locations, nothing else. From the first frame, before she arrives, the coin lot holds the humming vending machine screen-LEFT, the cinder-block wall with the leaning bicycle screen-RIGHT, three raised yellow flap-locks and four concrete wheel stoppers across the middle ground. That left-right arrangement is locked in both locations; the camera never flips it. Cat-sized Mochi already sits on the middle stopper. She brings in only the bag, and the only thing that ever leaves it is the remote, out once and back once, right hand; her free left hand rests at her thigh unless doing something named below. Exactly one named character appears; other people are distant passers-by, out of focus, faces resembling no reference, never approaching, never reacting.
SOUND
Location sound only: the vending machine's hum, sparrows, a crossing bell, a bicycle on the next street. Her soles scuff asphalt; the remote clicks hard and plastic. The growth is a low pressure thump felt more than heard, then grit skittering and a car alarm two streets off. Full-size Mochi breathes slow and heavy, weight landing in soft flat pads, gut sloshing faintly each step. Riding, the street rises — traffic a block over, a shutter rolling up, a crosswalk chirping. At the company lot it drops to ventilation fans and a distant car door. No silent gaps.
ACTION, in timecode
0.0-3.5 — EMPTY LOT. Static wide from the street entrance, chest height. Nothing happens for two seconds: overcast light, weeds shifting. Cat-sized Mochi sits on the middle stopper — it is wider than he is — blinking slowly, facing screen-left. A sparrow lands on the far wall and leaves.
3.5-6.5 — SHE ENTERS. Same framing. She walks in from screen-LEFT past the vending machine, sneakers scuffing, bag swinging once, and stops three metres from the stopper facing screen-right. She looks down at him, he looks up at her, their eyeline crossing the frame. Her face does nothing at all — no smile, no greeting.
INNER V.O.: 「また、そこ。」
6.5-9.0 — THE REMOTE. Cut to a closer three-quarter of her from Mochi's side, just above stopper height, so she reads tall against the sky with his ears soft in the foreground screen-right. Her right hand goes into the bag and comes out with the remote. She turns it over once, thumbs the worn keypad out of habit, settles her thumb on the big red button, lifts it at him. Her left hand hangs at her thigh.
INNER V.O.: 「電池、まだいけるか。」
9.0-13.0 — THE BEAM AND THE GROWTH. HARD CUT to a wide two-shot from the street entrance: her on the LEFT facing screen-right, Mochi on the RIGHT on the stopper, three metres of asphalt between them. Her thumb presses. The remote clicks and a thin flat beam of pale white light leaves the lens window straight across the gap onto his shoulder — physical light with visible falloff and a faint haze in the morning air, alive only while her thumb is down. Under it Mochi expands smoothly over two and a half seconds with enormous mass: the stopper disappears under him, his weight settles onto the asphalt with a low thump, grit skitters outward in a ring, the flap-locks vanish beneath his belly, the bicycle topples against the wall from the displaced air. He ends van-sized, five metres nose to tail, his back a metre eighty up — her head now level with his shoulder, and she tilts her chin to keep looking at him screen-right. Her thumb lifts and the beam is gone, no residue. His expression has not changed at all. She lowers the remote and puts it back, same hand.
13.0-16.0 — MOUNTING. Cut low from his front-left, camera near the ground, her small against his flank. He folds his front legs and lowers his chest with the slow effort of a heavy animal, loose skin bunching at the shoulder. She steps onto his folded foreleg, grabs a handful of coarse guard hair, swings her right leg over and settles astride behind the shoulders, one hand on his neck, the bag pulled to her lap, her free hand smoothing the skirt hem as she lands.
OUT LOUD, flat and quiet, like talking to a bicycle: 「おはよ、モチ。」
16.0-19.5 — LEAVING. Cut to a following shot from behind and above as Mochi rises and walks out screen-left into the residential back street. Parked cars come up to his chest; he clears the low gate posts with no room to spare. His back rolls side to side so she rocks with it and puts a hand down to steady herself.
INNER V.O.: 「電車より、はやい。」
19.5-23.0 — THE STREET. HARD CUT to a lateral tracking shot from across a two-lane street, long lens so the traffic compresses behind them. Mochi walks the leftmost lane at the pace of traffic; a compact car passes him on the outside without slowing, a delivery scooter goes the other way. She rides looking ahead over his head, one hand in his shoulder fur, hair lifting.
OUT LOUD, quiet, aimed down at the back of his head, no urgency: 「モチ、次そこ右。」
His ear flicks once and he drifts right at the corner without breaking stride.
23.0-26.5 — ARRIVAL AND SHRINK. HARD CUT to a static wide of the company lot from its far end: office block and lobby steps screen-RIGHT, bicycle rack and fence screen-LEFT, locked for the rest of the film. Mochi walks in from screen-left, stops in an empty bay and lowers his chest again. She slides down off his flank, straightens her skirt and jacket, takes the remote out and steps two paces back, pointing it up at his shoulder. Click, thumb held down: the same flat white beam, same falloff and haze, and Mochi deflates smoothly over two seconds with the same enormous-mass logic in reverse — his shadow shrinking under him, the displaced grit settling back — until he is cat-sized again mid-bay. Her thumb lifts, the beam is gone. The remote goes back in the bag.
INNER V.O.: 「ここでは、ふつうの顔。」
26.5-30.0 — GOOD MORNING. Cut to a closer three-quarter of her from the lobby steps, low, the office doors soft behind her screen-right. She crouches, scoops cat-sized Mochi up and sets him on her right shoulder, where he settles against her neck and goes still, front paws hanging. She stands, adjusts the bag strap, walks toward the steps screen-right and, starting up them, says it toward the doors ahead of her.
OUT LOUD, brighter and louder than every other line, a normal office greeting: 「おはようございます!」
Her face returns to flat neutral the instant the line ends. She takes the last step, the glass door swings, and the film ends on the empty bottom step with the quiet lot behind.
ACTING
Deadpan throughout. She treats a van-sized capybara as a commute, not an event — the work happens in her eyes and nobody plays the emotion. She never smiles, not even on the greeting. Mochi is a calm heavy animal at both sizes: slow blinks, slow breathing, one ear flick, never expressive, never reacting to the beam.
PHYSICS
Full-size Mochi carries real mass: his pads spread on contact, his belly and loose skin swing a half-beat behind his frame, his back dips as she settles. His gait is a real heavy quadruped walk, front and hind legs alternating strictly, one foot always on the ground, each pad landing flat. Coarse guard hair moves in clumps, not as a sheet. Denim holds its creases, sleeves stay pushed up, the frayed hem swings stiffly. Her soles land flat and audibly, heel first, strict left-right alternation. The bag swings and settles, never passing through her body.
NEGATIVE
No subtitles, on-screen text, readable signage, timestamps, logo or watermark. No background music at any point. No sparkle, glow, particles, lens flare or aura around Mochi. No slow motion; growth and shrink play at normal speed. Nobody ever looks at, faces or addresses the camera. No second capybara, no other animal, no crowd, no bystander filming. No object appears, disappears, floats or morphs into another. No identity drift between cuts, no duplicated limbs, no extra hands, no ghosting.