OK Go Release One Take Music Video Featuring 29 Robots and 60 Mirrors
OK Go — the band famous for making viral music videos — has released yet another mind-bending short film that makes incredible use of robotic arms and mirrors.
Much like the recent Netflix drama Adolescence, the video for Love was filmed in just a single take in a Budapest train station.
To make the complex routine come to life, the band employed 29 robotic arms, 60 mirrors, and an array of props and costumes to create a type of kaleidoscopic mayhem.
“We’re always drawn to spectacle and wonder and the goal, this time, was to take them somewhere more heartfelt and emotional than we have before,” says the band’s frontman Damian Kulash.
“This song is so personal for me, and the infinite reflections bouncing between two mirrors are a perfect metaphor for the kind of overwhelming, reality-shifting love that I’m singing about. Two simple things come together, and new dimensions burst from them into existence. Magic unfurls endlessly. It’s the impossible, right there before you. That’s the kind of wonder that can bring me to tears.”
The video features lots of innovative infinity shots that require mirrors to be placed perfectly parallel to each other. To be that precise, a robotic arm is called for and in an interview with Creative Boom, co-director Miguel Espada explains the team used Universal Robots’ cobots.
The robot arms meant human and machine had to move in perfect harmony. The crew had two days to nail the shot and after a day and a half, they still hadn’t managed to complete a full take from start to finish.
“There’s one scene that was choreographed by a human choreographer, and it took us some time to understand that robotic arms don’t move the same way humans do,” Espada tells Creative Boom. “It wasn’t a limitation; it just required an iterative process to explore the expressive potential of the robots.”
Kulash tells People that there are “always little things that go wrong along the way.”
“They feel more like pivots than they do dead ends. Like, okay, well, that’s not going to work, so this’ll have to,” he adds.
At the start of the year, OK Go released a music video for the single A Stone Only Rolls Downhill involving 64 videos shot on 64 iPhones.
