OK Go are famed for their creative and unusual music videos, and their latest masterpiece for the single Upside Down and Inside Out doesn't disappoint. You could say it's almost out of this world.
The American 4-piece have teamed up with director / choreographer Trish Sie – who was responsible for their epic treadmill video for ‘Here It Goes Again’ that won a Grammy Award – and this time took to the skies for a flight in a reduced gravity aircraft.
The routine itself took months to plan and set up, with OK Go spending three weeks at Russia’s Cosmonaut Training Center to prepare. This involved a total of 21 flights and 15 zero gravity parabolas per flight, totalling two hours and 15 minutes in weightlessness.
When shooting the video, the band wanted to maintain the appearance of a single take, but also wanted to make sure they were not just using zero gravity for random antics and instead had something choreographed. They also needed to figure a way to handle the three-minute long song considering the nature of parabolic flight using the provided Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft which typically gives around 21 seconds of zero gravity. They found that they were able to break the song into segments which they timed with the periods of weightlessness, slowing down the song about 30% for recording to match the flight timing better and enabling to set up more of the complex shots. Between periods of weightlessness, they adopted still positions, which they then used to trim out the periods of non-weightlessness and morphing the transition between these cuts, though still within the same take. The resulting video effectively includes eight periods of zero gravity, taken over the course of 45 minutes of flight time.
To get a single take they were satisfied with, a total of 20 flights were made with the aid of about 30 people including the camera crew and the plane's pilots.
The band chose the bold step to release the video on Facebook first rather than YouTube, and in less than 4 days has already racked up more than 42 million views!
The track is taken from their fourth album Hungry Ghosts, and the superb video can be seen below.
And if you liked that then here is the making of the video, which features the somewhat hilarious 7 failed attempts of the videos big ending.