IZ*ONE: Architecting an IP Universe
Translating Sonic Energy into a Symbolic Immersive Visual World
Overview
A music video, teaser films, and concept photography for IZ*ONE's comeback — centered on the album concept Oneiric Diary, in which the group inhabits a dream-turned-reality, fairy-tale world brought to life through cinematic fantasy. My role was Production Designer and Set Art Director: working from the director's and label's narrative concept, I translated their vision into physical space — designing the sets, proposing the visual devices and symbolic objects, directing color and lighting direction, and coordinating with the CG team to ensure the physical and digital worlds formed a seamless whole. The music video has accumulated over 117 million views on YouTube since its release in 2020.
Strategic Context
Building a World
K-pop music videos operate differently from conventional commercial productions. The set isn't just a backdrop — it's a piece of IP. Fans pause, zoom in, and spend hours decoding every visual detail. The environments I designed needed to function simultaneously as cinematic spaces, symbolic systems, and a world that could sustain long-term fan interpretation well beyond the release window.
Visualizing the Unreal
The Oneiric Diary concept demanded spaces that didn't follow physical logic — staircases above clouds, giant clockwork mechanisms, celestial columns suspended mid-air. The challenge was making these environments feel internally coherent and emotionally grounded rather than arbitrarily surreal, so that the fantasy world had its own rules and visual grammar even as it defied reality.
Translating Duality into Space
The track and its sub-title Swan carried an inherent tension — lyrical elegance and upward flight coexisting with the fragility and transience of a dream. The visual world needed to hold both registers: pure and weightless in its base palette, building toward saturated, high-chroma spectacle as the film reached its peak. This arc had to be designed into the physical environments before the camera rolled.
Core Decision
The director and label brought the narrative concept; my role was to make it spatially and visually real. The specific decisions that shaped how the world actually looked on screen were mine to define.
Spatial Interpretation of Symbolic Concepts
When the concept called for a room defined by clocks, I was deciding which clocks, at what scale, in what material, arranged in what spatial logic, and how they would interact with the performers moving through them. The steampunk-inflected clockwork set — giant golden gears, moving hands, the interior logic of a classical timepiece reimagined at architectural scale — was a specific spatial proposal, not a prop selection. Every environment worked this way: the concept gave me a theme, and I gave it a physical world.
Celestial Space as Visual Declaration
The opening and main choreography sets — staircases above clouds, columns appearing to float in mid-air — were designed to declare something about the group's identity before a single lyric lands. The spatial logic of these environments positioned the members not as performers on a stage but as inhabitants of a world above the ordinary, reinforcing the core narrative of girls who have crossed the threshold into a fairy-tale existence through the power of their own journey.
Water Stage as Spatial and Symbolic Device
The water stage set was designed for a solo sequence — a shallow pool that reflected the single member's presence in real time while responding physically to her movement, sending ripples and splashes across the surface as she danced. This created something a purely reflective floor couldn't: a sense that the environment itself was alive and reactive to the performer within it. Symbolically, the water surface functioned as the threshold between the real and the dream — a boundary she inhabits rather than stands above, giving the solo moment a visual weight and intimacy distinct from the group choreography sets.
Visual & Narrative System
Symbolic Object System
Across all sets and concept photography, I developed a consistent object vocabulary — white feathers replacing the flower petals that had defined the group's previous visual era, clock mechanisms as markers of time's fragility within the dream, and crystal elements evoking the beauty and brittleness of a moment that can't last. Each object was a visual argument, not a decoration.
Physical-to-Digital Continuity
The visual coherence between the built sets and the CG extensions was a central design concern throughout. The spatial grammar I established in the physical environments — the scale relationships, the color temperatures, the material qualities — gave the VFX team a clear foundation to work from, ensuring that the transitions between real and digital space felt like movement within a single world rather than cuts between two different productions.
Impact
117 Million YouTube Views
The music video has accumulated over 117 million views since its 2020 release — a figure that reflects both the strength of the group's global fanbase and the sustained rewatchability of a visual world designed to reward repeated viewing.
Fandom Engagement
The symbolic density of the visual system — the recurring objects, the layered spatial details, the color progression — generated ongoing fan interpretation and community discussion well beyond the launch date, extending the cultural life of the project in the way that strong IP world-building is designed to do.
Visual Era Established
The aesthetic built through this project became the defining visual reference for this chapter of the group's identity — recognized within the fandom community for the sophistication of its world-building and the coherence of its symbolic language across sets, costume, and CG.
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