OK Go Shoots An Entire Amazing Physics Defying 4 Minute Music Video In Just 4 Seconds
American rock band OK Go is well known for shooting mind-boggling and eye-catching music videos. Their latest music video may be their best on yet. Their song “The One Moment” is a super-slow-motion 4-minute video shot captured in over just 4 seconds of real time.
Director Damian Kulash, Jr remarked, “The song ‘The One Moment’ is a celebration of (and a prayer for) those moments in life when we are most alive. For the video, we tried to represent this idea literally-- we shot it in a single moment. We constructed a moment of total chaos and confusion, and then unraveled that moment, discovering the beauty, wonder, and structure within.”
The music video naturally required an immense amount of planning. Every choreographed detail was organized in a spreadsheet with over twenty-five columns and four hundred rows. They then used digital triggers to set off 318 separate events, including 54 colored salt bursts, 23 exploding paint buckets, 128 gold water balloons. These events were synchronized to the music and camera movements.
There are no cameras that can currently shoot that quickly, so they combined the movements of seven separate cameras. The slow motion shots were captured at rates of up to 6,000 frames per second (fps). There is also a sixteen second period of lip-syncing that is only 3x slower than real life or 90 frames per second. The watermelons are around 150x, and the spray paint cans are a little over 60x.
OK Go is also using this music video for good. The band collaborated with Morton Salt on its #WalkHerWalk campaign. Morton Salt is funding and assisting young innovators who are tackling issues such as the global water crisis, the plight of young female refugees, systemic failures in arts and music education, and children’s health and wellness education. Morton was inspired by OK Go’s video and felt it captured the spirit of its campaign, so it reached out and asked if the group was interested in making art with its salt. The video is therefore also a nod to the #WalkHerWalk campaign.
Director Damian Kulash, Jr remarked, “The song ‘The One Moment’ is a celebration of (and a prayer for) those moments in life when we are most alive. For the video, we tried to represent this idea literally-- we shot it in a single moment. We constructed a moment of total chaos and confusion, and then unraveled that moment, discovering the beauty, wonder, and structure within.”
The music video naturally required an immense amount of planning. Every choreographed detail was organized in a spreadsheet with over twenty-five columns and four hundred rows. They then used digital triggers to set off 318 separate events, including 54 colored salt bursts, 23 exploding paint buckets, 128 gold water balloons. These events were synchronized to the music and camera movements.
There are no cameras that can currently shoot that quickly, so they combined the movements of seven separate cameras. The slow motion shots were captured at rates of up to 6,000 frames per second (fps). There is also a sixteen second period of lip-syncing that is only 3x slower than real life or 90 frames per second. The watermelons are around 150x, and the spray paint cans are a little over 60x.
OK Go is also using this music video for good. The band collaborated with Morton Salt on its #WalkHerWalk campaign. Morton Salt is funding and assisting young innovators who are tackling issues such as the global water crisis, the plight of young female refugees, systemic failures in arts and music education, and children’s health and wellness education. Morton was inspired by OK Go’s video and felt it captured the spirit of its campaign, so it reached out and asked if the group was interested in making art with its salt. The video is therefore also a nod to the #WalkHerWalk campaign.
