A Mediterranean love story with a metaphorical twist.

She is falling deeper and deeper into a darkness and pushing him away. At the same time he sees that his optimistic attention towards her is making things even worse and he tries to contain the emotions he has, until his light literally starts pouring out of him.

FROM THE DIRECTOR

“The song has a fun summer anthem vibe to it, but if you listen closely it actually has quite dark and complicated story in the lyrics. I like when something complicated is wrapped in a pretty package, it makes it compelling. And I guess the message behind the lyrics is something I can relate to. I feel that sometimes I end up hurting the people who are closest to me the most. It is easier to pull away and suffer on my own.

But maybe, if I would take a leap of faith and trust that person we could face these problems together. In the end of the day, what have we got to lose?I wanted to use all of the little romance music video clichés and give them a double meaning or new life. So we took a 3 day road trip down the coast from Barcelona.

We had a very tiny team(seven people all together) and we basically relied a lot on chance and google street view scouting. But since our team was so wonderful we managed to have some fun as well! The title of the song “Sun Boy” was illustrated visually as his efforts to cheer her up start translating into him starting to leak light. The actors played the realistic situation whereas the effect of light acted as a visual metaphor.

Where possible we used actual mirror pieces to create the sunflares. This ended up being quite complicated, because we had to hit the reflection to the edge of the lens so every micro movement would ruin the effect. But for us it was really important to have this element of practical effect there as it sort of helped to sell the illusion. For the shots of more than one flare on him, my wonderful editor tracked the flares onto him in post.

Though it is very stressful, I love doing projects like this. Projects where we get to take a simple visual idea and make it something emotionally engaging.”

-Helen Takkin