Last year, both Sigur Rós and director Andrew Thomas Huang released some amazing music videos. Sigur Rós released 16 videos as part of "The Vaktaru Mystery Film Experiment," and Andrew released the visually epic "Mutual Core" by Bj?rk, a labor-intensive project that took over 5 months to create. Now, Sigur Rós and Andrew have teamed up on the stunning "Brennisteinn" video, a song that is slightly more aggressive sounding than the band’s more recent work, and the video that is darker and more narrative then what we’ve seen from Andrew. We talked to Andrew about the project, the effects, and how its success is measured.

Doug: How did you get involved with the project?

Andrew: My cinematographer, Laura Merians, who shot my film Solipsist and also shot with me on Bj?rk, had a connection with their management. She shared with them our past work, my film and everybody liked it. We started developing ideas with them and their managers for a new song that they hadn’t released yet for their new album. It was maybe a month and a half to two months of just bouncing ideas with them until we finally landed on something, then we officially kind of kicked into gear in December.

Doug: The last time we talked, you mentioned that you basically did many of the effects for the "Mutual Core" video on your own. Was it the same for this video where you were involved in every step of the way?

Andrew: It was. This video was very different because I didn’t have the normal resources I normally have because I used to be out in a studio, which had their own lab. This time I didn’t have that, so I worked out of The Mill in Los Angeles who provided additional help. The different challenge of this video was that it was eight minutes long. It’s frickin’ long. I just knew I couldn’t do anything as ambitious as Bj?rk again, at least effect wise, because it was too costly, too depleting, and I would’ve gone crazy. That’s why this one was so much more live action heavy, but there was still quite a lot of rotoscope to do on this. All the ropes and neon accents that you see throughout the video, those were hand-traced. I still made it kind of painful for myself, but luckily The Mill helped out with a lot of that. I spearheaded all the compositing for the bull, elfin monolith thing. The head was practical, but the body was CG and The Mill built that too. And then all the VHS tape stuff was all shot practically and composited together. It was still quite effects heavy, but not at all compared to the Bj?rk video. I had a much smaller team. It was really just me and then some of The Mill staff were available in between jobs, so it wasn’t quite the same production. It was quite a different workflow for this one.

Doug: Can you break down in like a percentage when watching the video how much of it is practical and how much of it was done in the back end? Or can you not really quantify it that way?

Andrew: I would say 80% practical. A lot of it has been comped together, but there’s very, very little actual CG in it. One of the big CG moments in the video is the collision at the end, which was done by The Mill in CG. it was a combination of that and particle sprites. That was probably one of the biggest CG moments of the video. Everything else is comping of real elements shot in camera.

Doug: What was the time span that you worked on this? "Mutual Core" you mentioned took five months. How long did you work on this project?

Andrew: I would say if you count development, which started around October or November, I would say a good four months. It was quite a long process as well. We needed the time. I think it was really still a very small operation and I think they hadn’t even finished recording the track until just before the video came out. It still stretched out too because not only is it an eight-minute video but it’s so cutty. It’s a lot of shots, a lot of flashes and stuff.

Doug: Because of the length of the song, did you try to put more of a narrative element into this one than some of your more recent work?

Andrew: Definitely. It’s funny because I originally had a even more narrative idea earlier, but the band wanted a narrative that was abstract. I had to create a narrative, and then figure out ways of shooting it in a way that would leave some of it out, to leave it kind of open-ended. The narrative actually was very clear I think in my development of it. The narrative is essentially these people trying to exorcise a beast out of someone, but then ultimately becoming consumed by it themselves. As clean as that sounds, I then had to figure out, "how do we shoot this? How can we break it up so that it feels a bit more fragmented and open-ended?" I know it might have left some people scratching their heads a bit, but when you have more live action for something that’s so long, there has been some kind of narrative to hold it all together. Also, another big major task of the video that was given to me was this is Sigur Rós’s first official performance music video. There’s plenty of footage of the band performing, documentary-style or live recordings, but there’s never been a music video where they’ve directly marketed themselves as performing in the video. Also, their fourth band member left, so this is like a big kind of re-coming out statement for them, and I couldn’t just have an eight-minute long performance video. There needed to be a story that we’re telling.

Doug: When it comes to working with Sigur Rós as a band, they have a lot of music videos that have been very popular and kind of groundbreaking recently. Is there a similar pressure in working with them than there is working with Bj?rk, who also has a crazy background of music videos? Or is Bj?rk such at a peak level that you can’t really compare anyone else to it?

Andrew: Bj?rk was very symbolic just given her legacy. It’s funny how Sigur Rós is only 10 years younger, but they do feel like a different generation - but they still have quite a long legacy. I absolutely felt a certain degree of pressure because I felt like I have my favorite Sigur Rós videos and I wanted to make sure that mine felt on par. I think what does make their songs so difficult is that they are so cinematic, and they’re so long, that you want to do it justice. Their songs are so vast and epic. It’s so hard sometimes to figure out, on a limited budget, how to capture something that feels as big as that song. That might have been the most intimidating thing when I first heard this song, I was like, “Wow, man. It’s like so epic. What can we do?” I mean my original idea was to have these people be sailors arrive on shore in Iceland on this boat, and they have all their belongings on the boat, and they burn it down and they drag the boat across the volcanic landscape as they let it burn. Because I think the song is very much about purging, as much as this is about brimstone and the fires of earth, but then a lot of it is about this retransformation and dispensing of the old. I just knew It had to be something as epic as the song, but it was difficult to try to pare it down to something that we could just shoot in a junkyard.

Doug: How do you gauge the success of a project like this? Some directors really care about view counts, others want to get Vimeo Staff Picks, others have a more personal, internal success that they're going for. How do you gauge the success of this project?

Andrew: To be perfectly honest, I’ve done so many videos now that I’ve taken off my website. I’ve done a lot of videos leading up to Bj?rk. When I did the Bj?rk video, it felt really good. It felt like, “Wow." I never thought I would be able to work with someone with a legacy like her. I remember watching the whole Palm Pictures Director Series and just being wowed by that. To think that I can work with someone who was part of it is pretty awesome, and that definitely felt like I can really check that one off. Of course, when I release something now, I want it to do well. I’m stoked if it's a Staff Pick or something, but really I think I want to know that I did everything I could to make that video as good as I could. That’s what’s important to me. This one seemed like a lot of hurdles and there were a lot of things that I wish we could’ve done that we didn’t, or maybe we didn’t have time to really carefully think some choices out. I still gave this one as much of my energy as I gave to my other ones. I think knowing that is good, and if it gets the Staff Pick or whatever, that’s great. It’s a bummer if it doesn’t, but nothing’s guaranteed. I’m not entitled to any of these awards or honors online. We’re all lucky if it happens.

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.