Description: We were in charge of planning and producing the music video for Superfly’s “Flare,” which is used as the opening theme for the NHK morning drama Scarlet. Inspired by the title “Flare,” the video’s main concept is stop-motion animation using candle flames. By using more than 800 candles, it expresses the gentle yet powerful world of Superfly’s singing.

Since this isn’t Cinderella, I can’t leave behind a glass slipper.

When I first heard this song, I felt my emotions scatter in every direction, as if confusion and calm were spreading through my chest at the same time. A faint hope within sorrow. A small flame flickering without fading, deep inside a frozen body. This work began by gently gathering those contradictory feelings, the fact that they simply “exist,” as a visual expression. This music video depicts an emotional journey that begins with a parting. How a heart that has experienced loss wavers, and eventually moves toward acceptance. That inner transformation is carefully woven together through color design, lighting, framing, and camera movement synchronized to the rhythm. A room submerged in water, an empty deep sea, a motorcycle racing through the city at night— all of it symbolizes the protagonist’s mental state and emerges as an inner landscape. For the lighting, rather than direct light, I deliberately used reflections and silhouettes to leave room for ambiguity instead of clear-cut “answers.” The camera work was designed to visualize the heart’s fluctuations, shifting like waves from stillness to motion, from tight to wide. As for the structure, I prioritized the flow of emotion over a conventional storyline, so that viewers could focus on simply “feeling” the piece. Scattered memories and thoughts overlap into a single mental landscape, and before long, quietly, they become a tear. That pool of water may perhaps be an ocean made of one’s own tears. I would be happy if this video could gently resonate somewhere with the “deep sea” that exists within each viewer.