Ito's debut feature-length film, Toward Zero, premiered at the 2021 Image Forum Festival,[4] and received a theatrical release in Japan in August 2022.
[7] After being repeatedly asked by Ito, his father eventually acquiesced to letting him attend a double feature of the kaiju films Daimajin and Gamera vs. Barugon; he later recalled that his resulting elation worried his parents.
[7] Ito also enjoyed drawing manga, both copying and creating original stories based on works by such artists as Shotaro Ishinomori, Osamu Tezuka, and Mitsuteru Yokoyama.
"[7] When he learned that Matsumoto was coming to work at the university, Ito abandoned plans to get an immediate job and decided to stay enrolled in the school.
Ito described Movement 3 as a prototype for his 1981 film Spacy, which he made while a student at the Kyushu Institute of Design, with Matsumoto offering guidance as a mentor.
[3] Ito's first film to be shot in 16 mm, and consisting of 700 continuous still photographs, Spacy is set entirely within a gymnasium, with multiple easels positioned around the space.
Through the use of a stop motion technique, the camera appears to glide around the room in varying patterns and enter the photographs on the easels, creating a recursive, seemingly endless visual effect.
[2][8] In 1982, Spacy screened at the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in France.
[3] According to fellow experimental filmmaker Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Spacy received considerable applause when it screened at Osnabrück University in West Germany in 1984.
[9] Following a later screening at the University of Würzburg, Kawanaka recalled, a hat was passed around the audience that eventually filled with a "mountain" of banknotes and coins.
[1][14] Ito continued to make experimental shorts into the 1990s and 2000s, with his output including The Moon (1994), Zone (1995), Monochrome Head (1997), Dizziness (2001), and A Silent Day (2002).