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OK Go is celebrating its 10th year of making pioneering music videos by unveiling its most ambitious clip yet. “Upside Down & Inside Out” was shot in zero gravity in the skies above Russia.
“It was nearly a decade ago that the world started buzzing about commercial space travel and exploration. When I heard about Virgin Galactic and Space X, it dawned on me that soon enough, people will be making art in space,” says OK Go singer Damian Kulash, Jr., who co-directed the video with frequent collaborator, Trish Sie. “So for years, we’ve been looking for the opportunity to make a weightless video. I mean, what could be more thrilling than astronaut training? I met with people from S7 at a media event at the Cannes Lions festival in France and that’s where the adventure began.”
In line with their mission to inspire people to chase their dreams, and to provide them the means to do so, S7 Airlines signed on to support the video. Together, they proceeded with a lyric from the song as their motto: “Gravity is just a habit.”
“We at S7 Airlines are proud to have supported OK Go in achieving their dream, thus creating the first art piece shot entirely in zero gravity. We believe that however hard the journey might be, every goal is attainable if you put your mind to it and won't settle or give up,” commented Tatiana Fileva, S7 Airlines Chief Marketing Officer.
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.”
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.”
Check out at the video over at the band's Facebook page:
