I am a sucker for a good Rube Goldberg machine – and I think that this music video, by the LA-based band, OK Go might be the most canny one that I’ve seen yet. It was shot in approximately 4 seconds but when slowed down, it runs for 4 minutes, completely in sync with the audio playback of the song, “The One Moment”. The choreography of stunts and the math involved are pretty staggering.
I ran another clever video of theirs almost 3 years ago.
I hope you enjoy this playful work of art as much as I do and that you have fun figuring out out how they
managed to speed up and slow down the camera’s frame rate, in conjunction with the corresponding audio playback, remaining in perfect sync, while the band members perform many sequential, complicated and fanciful live action stunts.
This music video took an immense amount of planning and expertise (i.e., a big budget) and it’s the first that I’ve ever seen with a corporate sponsor, Morton Salt. That’s not their record label and their future royalties, which was the financial model during the 1980s and 1990s, during the heydey of the video music genre. Perhaps this will be a new model in an industry that is now no longer awash in cash, except for a small handful of artists. MTV announced that it would return to broadcasting music videos but this may prove problematic to pull off, unless bands engage in sponsorships, like OK Go did here.
Performers with less artistic clarity could cause an artform, which formerly embodied class- and youthful rebellion to morph into a more radical form of the dread “Corporate Rock” than the music critics of the past could have ever dreamed. Actually, it’s been moving more in this direction for quite some time, with the total invasion of Disney Mouskateers and their soundalikes.
We’re back to the McCarthy-ite General Electric Theater with Ronald Reagan, all over again. Fake News, fake pop culture… Korporatismus über Alles.
Regardless, “The One Moment” is a stunning achievement, from the point of view of technical filmmaking.
OK Go:
Damian Kulash
Timothy Nordwind
Andy Ross
Dan Konopka
Directed by Damian Kulash
Produced by Park Pictures
Exec. Producer: Justin Pollock
Line Producer: Pat Frazier
Production Designer: Bradley Thordarson
Director of Photography: Shawn Kim
Editor: Cass Vanini
Post Effects: Artjail, Steve Mottershead
Fantastic!