If we were a band, we would want our first video to depict some kind of freaked-out orgy in a forest where everyone ended up melting and transforming into a giant, seething tower of liquid flesh that stretches up to the sky, before coming down and breaking apart again. But Seventeen Evergreen seem to have got there first. Dazed Digital caught up with director duo Isiah and Sean aka Encyclopedia Pictura and asked, well, what does it all MEAN? And what is "magnetic liquid" anyway?

So, how did you get from the music to the video?
These ideas were arrived at before we chose to do this song, but I guess it relates to the song in that the title lyric,"haven't been yourself lately", could suggest that this sort of behavior that's being displayed is representative of "being yourself", which leads to the idea that there was a primitive Eden in human history where we had not yet invented the boundaries that we now all neurotically maintain. I'm pretty sure that's not what the band was writing about, but that's what I get when I watch.

How long did it take to make and how many people were involved in it?
It took three months out of us, and we had nine sloppy friends in the woods, which we multiplied using digital wizardry.

OK, how does this "magnetic liquid" work?
We already had the melting human doggy-pile idea, but it really needed some radical punctuation. Sean saw some striking pictures of Ferrofluid being experimented with in Japan (thank you Sachiko Kodama), so we researched it and realized that we could afford to build our own Ferrofluid rig. Sean tried building electromagnets but they didn't really have enough umph, so we ordered some big rare-earth magnets that we then had to hand-operate (which is painfully dangerous). Eventually we bought a big bottle of the Ferro which took about a third of our budget. We built a miniature scale version of our grassy valley and filled it with the liquid. Then we shot it on a Photron camera at 1,000 fps. This was the real challenge of the whole thing because the entire sequence that is seen in the video happened in like one second of human time and we never knew if we were getting it right.

What else are you working on?
Right now, we are just doing lots of drawings of forest critters that we might want to use in our next project, which is shaping up to be a video for Devendra Banhart. He hasn't recorded the song yet so we haven't nailed anything down but we are leaning towards a psychotropic jungle musical shot in stereoscopic 3D. We want to do some really far-out choreography that gives people the chills, so we'll see what that turns out to be – maybe something like Singin' in the Rain performed by flexible Amazonian Shamans and human/animal hybrids.

You can see the video for Seventeen Evergreen – "Haven't Been Yourself" here: