Seiko: The Gift of Time - Scoring the Space Between

The Creative Brief

The Gift of Time is a short film in which some of Japan's leading cultural figures — architect Kengo Kuma, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, composer Shunichi Tokura, and singer MISIA — explore Japan's singular relationship with time. It's built around an idea that runs through Seiko's own framing: that time is our most precious resource, and that life's greatest luxury is spending it meaningfully.

What the director, Paula Chowles, wanted me to understand from the start was that this film necessitates contrast. There had to be moments that felt loud and fast: the rapid forward motion of time and progress, fitting for a company that has measured time for 140 years. But there also had to be moments of true reflection, where you're fully present and time slows to a crawl. The treatment for the film explored this directly: light and shadow, old and new, fleeting and forever. The musical references ranged just as widely, from meditative ambient jazz to stately neoclassical, and my task was to fold all of it into a single score while keeping the film's emotional heart front and center.

Developing the Concept

The instrumental palette was wide: quiet ambient piano in some moments, full orchestral arrangement in others, minimal synth and sound design elsewhere. What unites it is a deep reverence and respect for the artists interviewed in the film and for time itself.

For the quieter passages, I drew on my love of ambient music to translate the film's locations and luxurious pacing into a meditative space. I leaned on both acoustic and electric piano played spaciously, letting the phrasing weave in and out of the dialogue in conversation with the artists as they spoke. My approach for these moments was to improvised long segments with no click track, editing precisely to picture afterward so that the human feel of the performance came first.

In contrast, scenes like the bullet train sequence demanded precision and forward momentum. These I built section by section, locked to tempo, finding the right instrumentation as I slowly built up the arrangement. For the sequence on Kintarō Hattori, Seiko's founder, I built the foundation on taiko, then layered synthesized textures and guitar over that rhythmic core. Ultimately, finding the voice of this film came down to finding the pace of each scene: how does the timing of the edit make us feel, and how do I translate that into music?

Iterating to Picture

For this project, there were many iterations. Runtimes changed, scenes moved, and the pacing evolved from cut to cut, so the music had to keep shifting along with it. For example, the sequence with Kengo Kuma speaking about wood, the director told me the early passes felt too slow and were not frenetic enough. So with each version we crept closer to the energy that the scene needed. The opening posed its own challenge: pulling the audience in fast, then giving them room to breathe before building back up. Ultimately we found that balance only through careful and continued effort. All told, the score went through at least nine rounds before we landed on the right sound and pacing.

Takeaways

This project felt deeply personal, because it forced me to slow down and consider my own relationship with time. It arrived just as I was diving deeper into my practice as an ambient musician, and the film called for that slower sensibility: patience, space, room for harmony to settle into the story without overpowering it. I got to lean into my strengths as a keyboard player while guiding that playing toward something that served the film. The film asked me to be present with my own process and to think about how time is so crucial to our understanding of life and music. It was an opportunity to dive deeper as a composer and I left the project feeling deeply grateful for the time I have here on Earth.