Chicago-based indie rockers OK Go are so famous for their elaborate mind bending music videos that even rival the popularity of the catchy songs themselves. Their newest creation, a video for their song ‘One Moment’, is a time-defying slo mo juggling act of organised anarchy.
Though the video lasts for close to four minutes, the vast majority of the action (paint exploding, balloons bursting, etc) took place over the course of just 4. 2 seconds. Directed by the band’s lead singer, Damian Kulash, he not only meticulously thought out the exact camera movements required to capture a series of 325 events within seconds, but calculated how to match those events up to the music in exact sync.
/OK Go /YouTube
“Planning out this video was pretty intense,” Kulash says in behind the scenes footage. He explains that he spent eight to ten hours every single day for a solid month, going over mathematical problems. Organising the shoot would depend on matching beats to the framerates they would employ.
Kulash’s final spreadsheet tallying these features (54 colored salt bursts, 23 exploding paint buckets, 128 gold water balloons, etc. ) eventually consisted of dozens of pages, which referenced a master spreadsheet 25 columns by 400 rows in size. Joking on the intense strain this caused him Kulash says, “My brain fried out a few times and the machinery fried a few times. ”
‘One Moment’ went far beyond the base difficulties of a standard slow motion shoot. Over the course of filming, camera speeds wouldn’t even be constant. In order to be timed correctly, they would have to change as the video was being shot. Some elements (like the lip sync moments) were captured at 90FPS, while others (like the guitar explosions) were shot at 6,000FPS.
/OK Go /You
Regardless of how much planning was undertaken for this, there was not going to be individual camera system that could move or change direction fast enough to shoot this madness in its entirety. So the crew relied on seven different cameras on robotic arms, that worked in tandem with each other. These arm movements were synchronised with the digital triggers for each batch of events so that a camera was exactly in the correct position to capture during every frame.
“The last time that I’ve seen someone having to build something this accurate to fire pyrotechnics was the Manhattan Project,” commented Arnold ‘Fluffy’ Peterson, one of the video’s electrical engineers.
Though the headache was without a doubt severe, the experience is one we’re rather jealous of. From spending a month blowing up random objects to find out what looks good in slow mo, to babbling rapid-speed gobbledegook for the needs of lip-sync, to getting absolutely slathered in paint; getting this shoot done was obviously great fun and the results speak for themselves.
/OK Go /YouTube
But ‘One Moment’ wasn’t made just for laughs, OK Go state that the video was created for a very good cause.
Like the band’s past collaborations with brands such as Google, Samsung, and S7 Airlines; in order to afford the extensive costs, the music video was sponsored, in this case by Morton Salt. However rather than just working as a standard paid ad, the ‘One Moment’ video is intended to draw attention to the company’s #WalkHerWalk initiative, which encourages people to take the time to help others in need.
Kulash explained in a blog post, “They’ve pledged funding and assistance to incredibly inspiring and effective young innovators who are tackling difficult issues like the global water crisis, the plight of young female refugees, systemic failures in arts and music education, and children’s health and wellness education. ”
Further awareness will definitely be a likely as the video has racked up 7 million views in just a few hours. Kulash is pleased with how the complete audio and visual package and process to put it together succinctly express the message of how we must seize every single moment we are given and do the very best with it. He says, “One shot, one take, one moment; that is the metaphor. ”
. digitalrev.com2016-11-24 03:00
