Here we are, another time talking about a music video directly coming from Iceland.

It’s not the first time, should we make a weekly appointment for icelandic videos?!

This time we are talking about Seabear, an indie-folk band from Reykjavík that sings primarily in English.

We chose the music video for the song I Sing, I Swim, from their debut album The Ghost That Carried Us Away (2007).

If you are following us probably you already have a sense of who could be the director. She’s Inga Birgisdóttir (here you can find other music videos from her), but this time she didn’t work alone. In facts you have to know some tips: Inga is a member of Seabear and she worked to the video with Sindri Már Sigfússon, Seabear‘s frontman. Seabear started in 2003 as a one-man project of Sindri, called the “Icelandic Beck” by Rolling Stone. Seabear is now a large group that includes other artists, not only musicians and singers. For example Sóley Stefánsdóttir that we already met last week here on WPD.

But let’s talk about this music video, that is the most renowned one (it was viewed more than 1,300,000 times on YouTube as of July 2011). Like the most of the icelandic art, it is based on soft tones and sepia and in the beginning we have a hole in the center of a black screen and it is through it that we can see a man holding a colored book. There is a zoom in ’til we can see only the book and the hands. Now the book is the new stage in which everything is happening and we have in this way two frames: the round hole and the open book, a frame in the frame! The videos inside the book are old videos probably taken with an analog camera (or with a postproduction that simulates that old visual effect).

On an upper layer there some colored animations like drops of color falling over it. At the end of the video there is a zoom out while the man closes the book.

It’s like a poetry: it’s only recollections with nothing else and the book is a metaphor for the heart.

Let’s sing, let’s swim.