Music: New York directing collective New Media Limited takes hand-painted clay characters on a Hansel and Gretel-inspired adventure in the music video for Yeasayer's Silly Me track.
New Media Limited, which is made up of Mike Anderson, Ryan Dickie and Abigail Horton, had previously directed a film for Yeasayer, and were brought on board to create something of the same aesthetic.
"The only real direction we were given was to link it to I Am Chemistry, our previous video for Yeasayer, so we made it the prequel to that video," Anderson told Dezeen. "We wanted to do a riff on Hansel and Gretel, both cartoony and very dark."
"We'd already made a world in Chemistry, and it was fun to expand on that and the explore the solar system that world was in," he continued.
Anderson said the team's creative process often results in videos that form an "abstract" representation of the lyrics.
Throughout the Silly Me video, two main characters – a boy and a girl – explore a series of settings and landscapes.
They begin in a forest, before finding a secret house amongst trees filled with dancing animals.
The pair begin dancing with the fauna, who are cooking something in a cauldron, before the animals turn on them – eventually dismembering the boy and throwing him into the cooking pot.
The girl then dives into the cauldron after the boy, eventually falling out into a parallel universe. Here, she is met by strange dancing creatures who she eventually escapes by boat, which floats on a lake filled with the boy's body parts.
"As far as the dismemberment goes, I think there's almost a literal interpretation of a relationship falling apart in there," said Anderson. "When the girl finds the boy again, he's in pieces and impossibly large."
"Maybe sometimes that's what a memories of a former lover or lost friend feel like; shattered and disjointed, and impossibly large and effecting at the same time," he added.
Over a seven-week period, all the characters and major set pieces were made from clay. Each component was then 3D-scanned into a computer to be motion-captured.
Silly Me is out now on Mute records, and is available to purchase through iTunes.