OK Go Prove When it Comes to Music Videos 'The Writing's on the Wall'

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For most artists, music videos are a necessary evil, a way to promote themselves on television and the Internet with live, backstage and conceptual footage. Then there are the exceptions, artists who take control of the medium to express another side of their artistic vision.
Since the dawn of the art form some including Godley and Creme, Rob Zombie and Linkin Parkโs Joseph Hahn have created and shot their own videos with budgets ranging from reasonable to extravagant. But only OK Go have managed to create unparalleled low-budget, high concept mini-movies fueled by complex choreography, creative cinematogrphy, moving treadmills, stop-motion techniques, dancing dogs and even a Rube Goldberg Machine.
To date, many of the OK Goโs videos have received over 10 million views and their most popular work, โThis Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg Version)โ โ a mind-blowing Mousetrap-style, physics-driven creation that features a fluid series of actions triggering reactions, such as a piano falling, a hammer smashing a TV, umbrellas raining from the ceiling, various sized balls rolling down tracks triggering buttons and knocking down objects โ has topped 44 million views.
โOne of the things that has been the most satisfying about our career is when you do have a hit on YouTube it stays around forever,โ vocalist and guitarist Damian Kulash told Yahoo Music. โPeople keep discovering the videos and rediscovering the songs. So weโll go out on tour and people will have just learned about us two weeks before and theyโll discover something that we made five years ago.โ
OK Goโs newest video, โThe Writingโs on the Wall,โ came out June 17 and has already ratcheted over 9,776,000 views. Like โThis Too Shall Pass,โ the clip uses science as a tool to mesmerize viewers. The video was shot in a Brooklyn warehouse in a single take with a camera that follows the band members as they take part in unveiling a complex series of optical illusions. Kulash came up with the concept years ago, but it took a lot of work to find the right crew to help the band execute the video.
Kulash co-directed the clip with Aaron Duffy, partner and creative director of 1stAveMachine and celebrity inventor Bob โThingamabobโ Partington. The group and their team worked on the video for over a month, first coordinating the illusions and how they would be filmed and then shooting the video, which took 20 days to set up and 61 takes to get right.
โIt was not an easy thing to do,โ Kulash said. โIn the past, if we wanted to make a video with dogs, it was hard to find the right dog trainers, but at least we knew we were looking for dog trainers. With this video we had to go out and find someone thatโs good with anamorphic illusions. Thatโs a more nebulous process.โ
To complement the video for โThe Writingโs on the Wall,โ OK Go shot a behind-the-scenes video that illustrates how the optical illusions were set up. Kulash is thrilled by the response both the making-of clip and the actual video have received and how they have helped promote the band as it heads out on the road to start promoting their Hungry Gosts.. As much as OK Go enjoy playing shows, theyโd much rather stay out for three weeks than 18 months.
โI love performing and traveling. It just goes on too long,โ Kulash said. โThere are so many other ways to be creative. I love making videos and designing the live show, I love how many kinds of creativity we get to employ all in this one job. When we work super-intensely with nerds of one type or another โ physics nerds, dog training nerds, dance nerds or filmmaking nerds โ we get in this tiny bubble and it feels like a creative summer camp. You throw yourself at something and try to make it. Itโs the best feeling in the world.โ
OK Go like to make their own schedule and thanks to the success theyโve achieved with videos and other projects, theyโre finally able to invent their own rules.โWe were never a particularly good fit for the traditional music industry modes of promotion and the way everything worked,โ Kulash said. โYou have to look cool in a particular way and act cool in a particular way. Youโre supposed to get big in London first and spread from there. There has always been a method by which these people do their thing and it always felt really uncreative. It wasnโt about following your ideas, it was following a pattern. Thatโs something weโve always opposed.โ
When OK Go left Capitol Records after touring for 2010โs Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the band took two years to write their fourth album Hungry Ghosts, which theyโll release October 17 on their own label Paracadute, with distribution from BMG.
โBeing in charge of the business means we donโt have to worry about things that same way,โ Kulash said. โWeโve been able to take out time with this and no one has been pressuring us to hurry up. This wouldnโt have worked the same way under the largess of a major label.โ
As for the new album, OK Go intentionally started writing without preconceived idea of how they want the music to sound and allowed their creativity to flow until they had a batch of songs. Having more time than ever to spend on a record meant being able to examine each song from every possible vantage point and add and subtract multiple layers and textures until they were happy with the results.
โIf we try to pick an endpoint and get there we can only get as far as our imagination took us in the first place,โ Kulash said. โWhereas, if we play around in a sandbox of sounds, the things that wind up resonating with us emotionally are usually really surprising. Theyโre much more multi-dimensional or complex than what we could have thought out. Once in a while we hit this alchemical reaction where one plus one equals a million and suddenly that thing is vibrating with these contradictory emotions. It could be melancholy and joyful and lusty and angry all at the same time. To me, thatโs when music sounds best. Itโs expressing an itch deep inside your brain where language and logic donโt get to.โ
By the time OK Go were done tinkering with Hungry Ghosts they had an album far more driven by keyboards and programming than their previous efforts.
โFor a lot of it I was moving,โ he said. โI was moving to New York and then I was moving back [to Chicago] so I didnโt have a studio for a lot of it. I could work on a laptop, but I couldnโt work anywhere else. But that just gave us a new challenge, which I liked. We are a white boy rock band. We are supposed to make music with guitars and play at certain tempos. But once again, we do our best work when weโre listening to our instincts and not chasing down something we think should exist.โ