(Radio.com) "They're flying through the air for about a second, or a second and a half, each," OK Go's frontman and video director Damian Kulash tells Radio.com. "Gravity is pretty slow, compared to ballistics!"
That's not a typical quote from an interview with a rock band. But then, there's never been anything typical about OK Go's mind-bending music videos, which aren't just videos: they're more like fantastic performance art pieces set to music. There was, of course, the synchronized treadmill dancing of "Here It Goes Again," the zero gravity dancing of "Upside Down and Inside Out" and the Rube Goldberg machine of "This Too Shall Pass." And for their latest clip, "One Moment," they once again produce a short film that will take your breath away.
Most of the video was shot over 4.2 seconds and slowed down; that slowed-down segment is followed by a 16 second real-time segment, and the video ends with a short slow motion scene. It's an exciting video, with hints of violence: there's lots of little things exploding.
"What we wanted it to be was a contrast between the harshness of the outside world and the beauty of that one moment," Kulash says. "The verses are about how the most beautiful thing, but the most tragic thing, is how fleeting and how temporary everything is. So take this moment and do something with it! So, what we wanted this video to do was to pull apart a moment of absolute chaos, which even verges on violence. And then to unpack that moment to reveal that it's beautiful inside."
The video was sponsored by Morton Salt, and their product makes an appearance in the clip. "Salt is fun to work with," Kulash tells Radio.com. "It was brave of Morton to let go and say, 'This is what we want to do,' and then let us take it from there. We don't work in circumstances where we have to do product placement. So, what do you do with a bunch of salt? We thought if we could suspend it in mid-air, the way we often use paint in our videos, that would work. That first shot is Tim [Nordwind, bass player] in front of a wall of salt canisters. and they've been dyed, so when they explode they make these beautiful clouds in the air."
Kulash directs or co-directs the band's videos, and while sometimes he creates the concepts in collaboration with the band, "One Moment" was a bit different. "This one was basically all math, because when you're working at those tiny time intervals, it's too fast to see. I had a spreadsheet that was about 400 rows and 26 columns wide, translating moments from one frame rate to another, from that frame rate to real time, and calculating how long it would take things to happen. It was all math."
Nordwind did have an important suggestion though: "I was like, 'It'd be cool if we could fly!'"
Kulash says, "I had a slightly different ending in mind, and I was explaining it to the band, and Tim was like, 'Can't we just fly?' His question was actually, 'Could I be in one of those human cannons?'"
"We try to keep the balance between 'This is what's possible' and 'This is what's awesome,' you need to be tugged in both directions at once." Read more and watch the video here.
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