Encyclopedia Pictura

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, says directing collective Encyclopedia Pictura.

“Nature is where it starts and where it ends,” says Isaiah Saxon thoughtfully.

I’ve been asking him and his creative partner Sean Hellfritsch about their influences and inspirations. So far, they’ve reeled off Hayao Miyazaki, Walt Disney and Leonardo DaVinci. Just like their heroes, directing collective Encyclopedia Pictura are into nature – in a big way.

But that’s not so surprising. The two founding members are from Santa Cruz in the US, near the Redwood Forest, an environment that’s had a huge influence on them. “That’s who you are. You are what you eat, you are where you grow up,” Hellfritsch muses. They’ve recently recruited a third wheel, artist Daren Rabinovitch, who had previously worked with them behind the scenes on sculpture and puppetry. Saxon and Hellfritsch went to the same junior high, but didn’t hang out together and start making films until after they’d finished at film school. Saxon went to film school in San Francisco while Hellfritsch went to Florida on a technical filmmaking course. When Hellfritsch returned they decided they should try making a film. It worked – it involved a camera mounted on a skateboard – and it just seemed right to take it further.

Since then they’ve created a few short films and music videos for numerous bands, and are now signed to Ghost Robot in the US and Strange Beast in the UK. Their most regular collaborations have been with band Seventeen Evergreen (Haven’t Been Yourself), and they’ve created other work for indie band Grizzly Bear (Knife) and hip hop act Zion 1 (Soo Tall).

What all their work shares is a creative approach to technology – puppetry, stop motion animation, and post – as well as a trippy aesthetic and an occasionally baffling surrealism. And nowhere is this dreamlike quality more strongly felt than in their recent Björk video, Wanderlust. Inspired by the Mongolian and Himalayan nomadic culture, the video features Björk as a mountain traveller negotiating a river journey. Along the way she encounters yaks, a shadowy alter-ego and a river god in the shape of a Chinese dragon. It premiered in New York’s Deitch Gallery on March 13, but not before a lot of angst-ridden tinkering. The video was famously delayed because of the length of time spent perfecting the post. But in fairness to the boys of Encyclopedia Pictura, this wasn’t through lack of hard work. Budget restraints left Saxon and Hellfritsch acting as post supervisors and handling much of the compositing themselves.

But one of the most distinctive elements of Wanderlust is the fact that it wasn’t confined to two dimensions. To them, 3D is a means of making their visions and creations more vivid. “We have our own histories with 3D. My dad gave me a stereopticon viewer a few years back that really solidified the importance of 3D as a transportive device for me. It was almost like getting a time machine. I could look at the images and really feel like I was there,” explains Saxon.

Hellfritsch was responsible for shooting in 3D, and found himself becoming adept at it. Although the technology existed for hire, it was prohibitively expensive. He found himself rooting around on the internet to find more home-made answers to shooting in three dimensions. But now they’ve cracked it, there’s no going back. Aside from one film they created before Wanderlust, everything they release from now on will be in 3D.

And that’s the dichotomy of Encyclopedia Pictura. They’re pioneers at the furthest reaches of technology – whether it’s the months of post that go into much of their work or figuring out how to make mud magnetic – and yet at heart, they’re country boys. They talk wistfully of creating a workshop deep in the forest. Periodically, they go for ‘adventures in nature’, setting aside ‘nature days’ to venture out of San Francisco, where they’re now based. Even when they’re confined to the city, they end up being drawn to green spaces – Wanderlust was story-boarded in Central Park, just by the Natural History Museum. There’s something quietly reverent about the way they talk about the natural world, like they’d be just as happy living as hearty woodsmen or bearded tree hermits as directing music videos.

“Nature is the great creator in terms of how forms should be, how behaviour should move,” says Saxon. “Even for how a story should unfold, we look to the natural world.”

The call of the wild resonates throughout their work. From the yak-friendly nomad in Wanderlust right back to their early films. Grow is a short film about a lettuce man, who covers buildings in leaves, while Micro-Macro explores the universe from strings, quarks and atoms all the way up to solar systems and galaxy clusters via the medium of stop-motion vegetables.

There is another, less tangible side to the collective, mystical yet primal, spiritual even. Not religious as such; it’s more to do with magic, shamans and the mystery behind natural forces. The idea that an artist can plant feelings and thoughts into another person is, after all, pretty magical. “In some ways, video is the 21st century Western culture’s attempt at what the shaman did, which is basically taking you into a tent or cave and showing you worlds you’ve never seen and giving you these lessons and experiences which will affect you all through your life.”

Myths and magic all inform a world view that doesn’t always sit comfortably within their chosen field. Film success is, after all, quantified by advertising revenue and mainstream appeal. But Hellfritsch and Saxon are both 25 years old, and, thanks to Wanderlust, they’re free to be choosy about future projects.

And where would the nature-magic continuum be without a little chemical stimulation? Hellfritsch acknowledges that from time to time he experiments with psychedelic drugs to explore his subconscious and perceptions of reality. “It has a lot to do with our own psychic journey through life and our own meta-programming, making ourselves who we want to be. The experiences also offer creative control over yourself and your changing perceptions of reality. It’s really appealing to us and it opens up fundamental questions about the world.”

But while they acknowledge that psychedelic drugs are part of their spiritual and creative process, they are keen to stress that it’s not something they take lightly or regularly. “It’s something that should be taken really seriously as far as we’re concerned. That’s why I haven’t done it for so long. I really give a lot of personal fear to it, I give it the fear I think it’s worth. I don’t want to use it socially or just for a bit of fun. It’s more of a tool for exploring the subconscious, exploring nature and exploring reality.”

Hellfritsch says that he hasn’t had a psychedelic drug for at least a year.

There are sound reasons for this. For one thing, taking them in the middle of a project can end up disrupting the work, throwing up doubts, questions and irrelevant ideas. But also, apart from anything else, at the moment they’re too wrapped up in their current projects to allow themselves to get too distracted by what are essentially visionary tools, not a lifestyle.

The collective is currently working on the early stages of a new music video project. And after that’s out of the way, they’ve got their eyes on other things. Like feature films, although at present their movie project is still in the conceptual stage, consisting of little more than character ideas, musical inspiration and thematic elements.

A feature film (in 3D of course) may be on the horizon, but their vision for the longer term seems more experimental. Picture, if you will, Encyclopedia Pictura: The Game. It’s unlikely it will have the feel, pace or gratuitous violence of Manhunt or Grand Theft Auto, though – it’s the absorbing interactivity of the format that really appeals to them.

“Film is a fascist dream, because you’ve got one person’s, or in our case three people’s, dream being seen by a huge audience. But that audience doesn’t get to create the dream themselves. Whereas video games are basically everyone creating the dream as they’re experiencing it,” says Hellfritsch. “We just found that’s a lot closer to the way people feel empowered; when their own creativity gets expressed.”

But before they get cracking with the scores of reality-melting new ideas and projects, Encyclopedia Pictura have some unfinished business to attend to.

In the last year or two, they’ve been so busy that they haven’t had the chance to retreat to their natural habitat. Once their current project is finished, however, they’ve got plans to climb a mountain (although they haven’t decided which one), make lots of smoothies and fix up a sailing boat they’ve acquired. And for a collective like Encyclopedia Pictura, retreating to the wilderness to recharge and revive is vital. “Really, nature is where it starts and where it ends.” Hold on a second, was he saying something about the mysterious cycle of life just then? I’ll have to go back to the beginning of this feature...