Notes from the founder
Occasional notes from the KAZENA team — Taro and the people building alongside him — about Indonesia, the Philippines, and running a small business here.
- LatestVideo (Motion)October 26, 2026
Cropping a landscape video to portrait usually cuts the words
We built all 11 samples in landscape and assumed we could crop them for a phone's portrait screen. We could not. This is about the cuts we found when we rebuilt a separate portrait composition for every one of them, and the fix that taught me a few pixels of margin is not a margin.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 21, 2026
Forty real photographs, and a darkness chosen one by one
Our sample films were drawn entirely in code. They looked tidy, but the coffee did not look like coffee. Here is what we decided when we put 40 real photographs into 7 of the 11 films: which photographs not to use, how dark to make them so the text stays readable, and how we checked.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 17, 2026
Breaking "it looks cheap" into items we could actually fix
I looked at the car in one of our sample films and thought it looked cheap, without knowing what to fix. Breaking the impression into items turned it from taste into a list of absences — here are the 5 we found, and why the car later came off the page.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 14, 2026
We invented nine brands that do not exist, and let the industry decide what comes first
Nine of our 11 sample films are fictional brands we built ourselves, from the name to the logo. Here is why we did not use real companies, and how the thing a film has to show first changes with the industry.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 12, 2026
Every sample is 15 seconds because only about 10 of them are content
We fixed all 11 sample films at 15 seconds. Subtract what the open and the close need and about 10 seconds are left for content, and what fits there is 1 action or 1 promise. Here is that arithmetic, and what we have not measured yet.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Video (Motion)October 9, 2026
We do not hold a single one of our sample films as a video file
The KAZENA Motion page we put up on 8 October carries 11 sample films of 15 seconds each, and 10 of them are not video files at all: they are written as HTML, CSS and JavaScript and drawn inside the visitor's browser. Here is why we chose that, and what we gave up instead.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post