Mad River editor Emily Dennis has helped sort the visions of the notorious and the legendary, working with the likes of Pytka, Kaye, Scorsese and Glazer. Recently, she collaborated on a video for another creative force: Björk. The strange and stirring cocoon video stands out from typical MTV fare like, well, like a naked pixie with red strands emerging from her nipples. @radical.media director Eiko Ishioka created the concept for the intensely intimate song and worked with Dennis, DP Harris Savides and London's Glassworks to bring her vision and her drawings thereof to life. The clip has a Geisha-coifed Ms.Gudmundsdottir standing naked (but somehow not - courtesy a prosthetic doll-body created by Glassworks) as red ribbons dance around her, guided by her movements until they encircle and eventually encase her in a cocoon.

Dennis was already hip to Ishioka's work as an ex agency creative, artist and costume designer (with visual epics like "The Cell" and "Dracula" to her credit). "It was scary and thrilling because what she said was, this is an art project - she wanted me to approach it that way," says Dennis. "We didn't have to please the record company, just ourselves." With a background in art and painting, Dennis readily applies that ethic to her work as an editor: "It's still texture and color and form and content."

Dennis says the intention was to maintain a simple and minimal feel for the video and says Ishioka shot only a small amount of film from which the editor assembled her cuts. That provided one challenge; another was finding an arc to the visual piece from a song that contains no obvious peaks. "The more I listened to the song, the more I just really let her performance guide the edit," says Dennis. "It's such a sexual and heartfelt song from her. So whether there was continuity between the wide shot and the medium shot became secondary; it was just what was truthful about Björk at whatever moment and that's what I cut to." Before the liquid ribbon effect was added, she says, that approach required a leap of imagination. "I think it scared the pants off people. They were like, 'You're jumping.' But I just had to let that go. We were breaking convention with the concept already so I wasn't going to let this stop me. Especially with someone like Björk, who is so sculptural in the way she moves. I let that dictate the cut, and to be honest, that's my strength as an editor - I don't impose myself on something. It is what it is and I let it inform me of what the edit is."

Dennis had an ongoing dialog with Glassworks throughout the process and worked with the director to determine how the red substance should appear and move. Ishioka made drawings of her interpretations of the ribbon, which were sent to Glassworks as a guide. "We'd give them a start, middle and end frame on a long shot, for example, to show the path we wanted it to do. Nothing was written in stone - it was very collaborative."

Dennis' next project is a new collaboration with Scorsese on the DVD release of The Last Waltz. The DVD will include newly discovered footage of post-curtain performances by some of the artists who joined in The Band's famous farewell. Dennis had worked earlier with Scorsese on a spot for Orange and calls the experience an actual dream come true: when Dennis became an editor, working with the acclaimed Italianamerican was a stated goal. Dennis will next edit a Chase Manhattan project with @radical's Frank Todaro.