OK Go's Printed Promo is a Triumph of Obsession

If you were wondering - oh ye of little faith! - how OK Go were going to top the mind-bending brillliance of their last two promos - the zero-gravity extravaganza Upside Down & Inside Out, and The One Moment, in which they dramatically slowed down a 4.2 second-series of explosions then rest assured, the video for their latest track, Obsession, could be their most technically jaw-dropping yet. 

A partnership between the Chicago rockers and paper company Double A, the branded promo, helmed by Damian Kulash and Yusuke Tanaka, combines stop-motion imagery, militarily-precise choreography and 567 printers to create what's billed as the "world's first paper mapping" project, in which a wall of machines spew out countless sheets of paper to create a constantly-changing multi-coloured backdrop.

More than two years of meticulous research, planning and testing went into the project, which saw the band team up with a host of creative partners including Japanese agency SIX; Rhizomatics Research co-director and media artist Daito Manabe, who developed the program to control all 567 printers in unison; and choreographer Mizuno Mikiko, who came up with the precise routine to coordinate the band members' moves with the paper mapping background.

The shoot itself took a further five days, and we can only imagine the nail-biting terror that one of the printers would jam at the crucial moment - but the seamless final result is a brilliant way of demonstrating the 'superior smooth quality' claims of Double A's product.

If, like us, you've been watching the video on loop and are still scratching your head and wondering 'how on earth did they do that?', then the behind-the-scenes video, below, helps shed some light on the process.

And if you're worried about the fate of those huge piles of paper generated during the video, fear not - according to a statement at the beginning of the video, it has all been recycled and the proceeds donated to Greenpeace.