Professional surfer Mahina Maeda has roots in two countries: the US and Japan. To illustrate the difficultly of living in Japan, where traditional femininity is celebrated, this story is set in a Japanese castle surrounded by an ocean.

It’s a mystical and strange world that seems like both modern Japan and Japan from long ago.

3D modeling and zero-point perspective art in Japanese 'Nihonga' paintings were combined to add depth to the world of the painting, to symbolically portray Mahina being at the mercy of the stereotypical Japanese standard of beauty.

We had Yasunari Ikenaga, a top-level artist in traditional Japanese painting creates a 70cm x 70cm painting, and this was then traced and put into the animation.

We shot the live-action section in Tahiti—her training ground.

When the biggest wave came, we ventured into underwater shooting to capture her being dynamically buffeted by the rough waves of fate.