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OK Go Does It Again: The First-Ever All Zero-G Music Video

We’ve come to expect OK Go to do weird and cool things with their music videos. Now they’ve shot a clip aboard a “vomit comet,” one of those air force trainers that fly extreme parabolic trajectories to simulate zero gravity for a short period of time. With the cooperation of a Russian airlien name S7, they did this.

OK Go – Upside Down & Inside OutHello, Dear Ones. Please enjoy our new video for “Upside Down & Inside Out”. A million thanks to S7 Airlines. #GravitysJustAHabit

Posted by OK Go on Thursday, February 11, 2016

From the press release:

After months of planning, OK Go headed to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center for ROSCOSMOS (the Russian equivalent of NASA), where they spent three weeks playing, testing, and filming.  In total, they flew 21 flights, with 15 zero gravity parabolas per flight, for a total of about two hours and fifteen minutes in weightlessness. ROSCOSMOS provided the Il-76 MDK plane and cosmonaut training staff.

“Upside Down & Inside Out” – which features the band and S7 air hostesses Tatyana Martynova and Anastasia Burdina, who are trained aerialist acrobats – was shot in an airplane that flies parabolic maneuvers to provide brief periods of weightlessness. The longest period of weightlessness it’s possible to achieve in these circumstances is 27 seconds, and after each period of weightlessness, it takes about five minutes for the plane to recover and prepare for the next round.

“Because we wanted the video to be a single, uninterrupted routine, we shot continuously over the course of eight consecutive weightless periods, which took about 45 minutes, total,” explains Trish Sie. “We paused the action, and the music, during the non-weightless periods, and then cut out these sections and smoothed over each transition with a morph.”

This is the fourth OK Go video that Sie directed with her brother, Damian Kulash, Jr., including the GRAMMY-winning clip “Here It Goes Again.” She also directed the band’s video for “Skyscrapers.”  Her films include the 3D feature “Step Up All In” (Lionsgate/Summit 2014) and numerous award-winning shorts. Her latest, “The Big Breakup,” an exploration of America’s dysfunctional love affair with guns, will be released in March 2016.

“Upside Down & Inside Out” is a track from OK Go’s latest album, Hungry Ghosts (Paracadute/BMG). While the band now resides in Los Angeles, it was founded in Chicago, where boutique donut shop Do-Rite is celebrating the release of the video with a new creation. For a limited time, customers can feast on the “Upside Down & Inside Out” donut – an upside down brioche bullseye, dipped in dark chocolate and toasted peanuts – then inverted – filled with an espresso cream and glazed in vanilla bean glaze with peanut bits.

With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire (Paracadute), collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that aims to encode Hungry Ghosts on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved. The band has been honored with a GRAMMY, three MTV Video Music Awards (one of them from Japan!), a CLIO, two WEBBY Awards (including one for their collaboration with The Muppets and Sesame Street), a spot in a Guggenheim installation, and a total of eight Cannes Lions  – the advertising world’s most prestigious awards.

Reflecting on the past decade, Kulash, Jr. notes, “We were so lucky to have our first homemade videos land right at the moment when internet video was just starting to open up as a new cultural phenomenon. It gave is a new sandbox to play in and it emboldened us to keep chasing our wildest creative ideas, both in music and video, regardless of where they lead.”

 

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 38005 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

2 thoughts on “OK Go Does It Again: The First-Ever All Zero-G Music Video

    • Excellent point. Apologies to Commander Hadfield. However, the average band doesn’t have an opportunity to film aboard the ISS. We’ll give OK Go points for going zero-G while remaining within the atmosphere.

      Reply

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