OK Go defies gravity in new video "Upside Down & Inside Out"
What is OK Go getting up to now?
Indie rock band OK Go made a name for itself with innovative, viral-friendly music videos for its songs, starting with 2006's "Here it Goes Again," which featured the group engaging in choreography on sideways treadmills. Their latest video, for the song "Upside Down and Inside Out," ups the ante even further, featuring the group floating around untethered on a zero-gravity flight in a single, colorful take.
The video features suitcases of bouncing balls, confetti-filled pinatas and spinning, airborne flight attendants, culminating in the group popping paint-filled balloons that float a moment before covering the band and the gray cabin walls.
The clip is co-directed by longtime OK Go collaborator Trish Sie and the band's front-man, Damian Kulash. "It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, and when Space X and Virgin Galactic started coming into the public eye around 2007, 2008, I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, people are going to be making art in space soon, and I wanna do that,'" Kulash tells Red Bull's website. "Then I met with people from [Russian airline] S7 at a media event at the Cannes Lions Festival in France, and that's where the adventure began."
The video, done in a single take, involved creating a system of choreography built around eight flight parabolas. "In each flight you have 15 parabolas and in each parabola you have 20 seconds of double gravity, then 50 seconds of weightlessness and few minutes of setting it all up again," Kulash explains. "So to make it one take, we took eight of these in a row over 40 to 45 minutes."
To answer that question you're dying to ask, none of the band members lost their lunch, but others did. "The band were on pretty heavy anti-nausea drugs," Kulash says. "Of course, given roughly 25 to 30 people on the plane and over the course of the 20 flights we did, we think there were 58 times that people puked. So it was averaging two to three per flight."
As for the song itself, "Upside Down and Inside Out" isn't exactly new, coming off the band's well-reviewed 2014 album, "Hungry Ghosts." It's catchy and punchy and provides enough momentum for the video's visuals. Whether or not anyone's actually listening to the music itself, the video quickly racked up more than 3.5 million views on Facebook in four hours.