How OK Go turned a 'simple' concept into a 577-hour experiment

Whenever a new OK Go video drops, the creative community's mixture of anticipation and professional jealousy is palpable.

Renowned for engineering the most intricate and seemingly impossible shoots, the band have never shied away from putting in the blood (literally, see below), sweat (inevitably), and tears (undoubtedly) needed to conjure greatness.

For its latest offering, A Stone Only Rolls Downhill, co-directed by band frontman Damian Kulash and Chris Buongiorno through Park Pictures, the concept is 'simple': turn a grid of iPhones into a mesmerising motion mosaic, executed, of course, with the team's signature dedication to in-camera ingenuity.

We caught up with Kulash and Buongiorno to break down the creative process, the meticulous planning, and the challenges behind their latest visual experiment.

I think the first thing that always has to be asked when looking at a new OK Go video is… why do you do it to yourselves? Is it a case of finding something that seems impossible to achieve and figuring out a way to do it?

Damian Kulash: Yeah, we definitely have a masochistic streak – a sort of moth-to-the-flame relationship with the dauntingly difficult. But the thing that drives it, deep down, is good old-fashioned human connection. If we can nudge something into existence that catches you by surprise and makes you feel something on a gut level, then we’ve bridged the chasm between our lonely brains.

We definitely have a masochistic streak – a sort of moth-to-the-flame relationship with the dauntingly difficult.

What I love so much about making both songs and videos is that they are their own end. Whether a song brings you to tears or makes you jump on your bed for joy, that feeling alone is the point. We don’t have to set up the hero to take a fall in the next scene or demonstrate product features; we get to chase wonder for wonder’s sake. 

So, even though our video process is often absurdly complicated, it feels like such a blessing to have carved out this little niche where we can make films the same way we write songs.

What was the seed of this idea? Did it stem directly from the track?

DK: The song is about how we’re living in a split screen. The only way to put one foot in front of the other each day is to have some faith that, as MLK put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But that faith is becoming increasingly hard to sustain, whether you’re focused on the climate or the rise of authoritarianism. And the worse things get, the more stark the split screen becomes. Optimism feels all the more necessary, while anxiety feels all the more pervasive.

Playing with this in a visual way meant making the most physical, human, DIY split screen we could. 

Instead of digitally connecting multiple shots, we wanted to see what we could make if each screen plays a single unedited shot, and all of the interplay of the contents is planned and performed, rather than edited together.

Above: Buongiorno [L] and Kulash [R] on the shoot.

How much R&D goes into creating an OK Go video? Is it an iterative process?

DK: We spend a crazy amount of time on these. This one was 577 hours of prep (at least the ones we could go back and count), which is on par with some small features. 

And yes, it’s incredibly iterative. 

Almost nothing is imagined out of whole cloth – it’s all found and discovered through round after round of play and experimentation.

Chris, at what stage did you get involved in the process? How did it compare to previous jobs you’ve worked on?

Chris Buongiorno: I came on board very early on — Damian was initially looking for someone to help previs some of these split-screen concepts, and we were connected through Park Pictures. The collaboration took on a whole new life once we started discussing ways to push the concept, and we ultimately decided to co-direct.

It felt like working on an indie film, where everyone wears many hats and contributes to the overall vision.

I’m used to working in film and TV, most recently with Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, and while the scale of this is considerably smaller, the process and workflow were comfortably similar. We were a very small crew — just me, Damian, our editor Justin, and the band getting together daily to experiment and play around. It felt like working on an indie film, where everyone wears many hats and contributes to the overall vision. 

It was a true “summer camp” experience. It was refreshing to work in such a non-traditional way, compared to the typical “board, prep, shoot, edit, finish” process we’ve all become accustomed to.

Can you talk us through the actual shoot(s) – what pieces of the jigsaw puzzle had to be laid in place and in which order?

CB: What I love about this video is how deceivingly simple it actually is – viewers can watch it and immediately understand how we pulled it off, and with enough time and planning, they, too, could pull off a similar feat. On paper, it’s just 64 variations of the same single take. The shoot itself was fairly straightforward – simple lighting in a simple space. We were forced to shoot everything in sequential order since that’s how it plays out in the final video.

But it’s deceiving in that every take has to be meticulously planned out, each with its own intricacies and subtle changes from one to the next. It’s a bit of a house of cards, really, because each one connects to the ones next to it. When you start to plan it out, it quickly becomes a delicate math problem – I called it “playful freedom with surgical accuracy.”

What was the most challenging aspect to get right? How did you manage it?

DK: For me personally, the most difficult challenge was the slow pace of experimentation. I feed off the thrill of discovery, and when we’re in pursuit of an idea, I normally feel like a dog bounding through the forest, frenetically picking up new scents as I go. 

For this project, testing a single idea required carefully shooting 10 or 20 clips and then digitally cobbling them together, so it was careful snail crawling, not boisterous dog bounding. Sometimes, it would take a week to get through three or four tests, and we’d find that only one of them had any promise at all. 

It’s hard to stay excited at that pace.

From a performance perspective, the choreography of my bandmates Tim and Andy during the last minute of the video (in which they’re alternately singing to camera and holding up phones that make a moving mosaic) is pretty mind-boggling. 

When you start to plan it out, it quickly becomes a delicate math problem – I called it “playful freedom with surgical accuracy.”

We shot for days on end, and their routine was super complex, with small but vital differences each time, meaning they couldn’t just memorise it and repeat. They had to do almost the same sequence hundreds of times, tracking and making subtle changes with each pass. I was amazed by what they pulled off.

CB: The most challenging aspect for me was making sure that, throughout all of this intricate choreography, the performances felt human and not robotic. Keeping track of each one of those subtle changes was hard enough for Tim and Andy alone, but making it look fun and effortless required an incredible amount of patience and stamina. We had very specific audio cues for each of the sections they had to hit – “phone up in 3, 2, 1” would be followed by “Tim eyes in 3, 2, 1” – and you can imagine the mental focus it required to do that over and over again.

Are there any elements that you might do differently, were you to do it again?

DK: There was an idea we chased for over five weeks before finally convincing ourselves it was going to stay firmly rooted in the territory of impossible. We wanted to choreograph a dance where our body parts would mosaically combine over several screens into the moving image of a face, but it turned out to be not only incredibly hard to do but also repulsive to look at once we succeeded. Though it turned out to be a great launching pad for other ideas, if we were to do this again, I’d happily reclaim those five weeks.

CB: Ha! Yeah, I’d never felt so much relief and heartbreak in a single moment before.

How was the edit for the piece? Was it tricky to nail the seamless action?

DK: Our editor, Justin Clare, is amazing – such a pleasure to work with. But most of his work wasn’t in traditional editing; it was streamlining our process for trying out ideas with so many component parts and helping us visualise tests. The one area where we did have a little room for fixing stuff in post was in the exact framing of each shot. 

We shot everything in 4K using the phone’s 1x mode (roughly 24mm equivalent) but then cropped down to the equivalent of 2x (48mm) so we could have wiggle room to line stuff up before loading each clip onto its respective phone. Justin was also our one-man file management czar. That was a massive, unruly task – he’s easily the MVP of this project.

CB: In a way, we were editing on the fly. Since the videos had to be played back on the phones, we were forced to select takes as we shot. Meanwhile, Justin was in the background (quite literally – you can see him at his workstation during the camera pan section!) putting everything together to make sure it was all lining up properly. 

We designed this particular “edit on set” process far in advance of the shoot so that we were able to catch any mistakes fairly quickly.

Can you talk to us about PMI’s involvement?

DK: PMI contacted us through the wonderful boutique Maximum Effort. They were looking for playful, sticky, creative ways to illustrate that complex problem solving is the backbone of creativity, and it’s a teachable skill. 

In a way, we were editing on the fly. Since the videos had to be played back on the phones, we were forced to select takes as we shot.

It was a perfect fit, and they were an absolute dream to work with. I hope we can do more, because it’s a match made in heaven.

OK Go has never been shy at working with brands to create engaging content. How has this helped the development of the projects and why do you think more artists/bands don’t take the opportunity?

DK: We always see it as an opportunity to make art with whatever that brand specialises in. 

Sometimes, that’s as literal as the car we made music with for Chevy’s Super Bowl spot (it was streamed more than Madonna’s halftime show the next day!), and sometimes it’s a more associative brand quality. 

Again, the videos are their own end, so if a brand or a product is organically part of making one, it’s ideal. The art is the car and the car is the art – there’s no friction, no dissonance. 

But finding those perfect harmonies isn’t easy, and I think most bands are scared of brands and vice versa because both sides so frequently see these collaborations as zero-sum games in which the artist wants the brand’s resources, the brand wants the artist’s cultural currency, and only one side can “win.” If you start from that perspective, usually everyone loses, of course. 

I’m guessing it’s that set of assumptions that keeps more interesting collaborations from happening?

We’ve had dancing dogs, super-slow-mo odysseys, and the greatest synchronised unicycle routine in history – what's been the most challenging OK Go project to date?

DK: They’re all challenging in their own ways. Physically, I think it was Upside Down and Inside Out, because dancing in microgravity is super nauseating, and people kept getting injured, slamming into things. 

Logistically, it was Needing/Getting because it’s hard enough to get thousands of instruments lined up perfectly for a car to hit without the Santa Ana winds then scattering them across the desert six hours before the shoot. 

In terms of security, I’d say it was This Too Shall Pass (the Rube Goldberg version). We were pulling an all-nighter before shooting when a drunk driver took out the power transformer for the whole block. Less than an hour later, while we worked by people’s cell phone lights, a guy on PCP tried to break into the warehouse, using our radial saw as a battering ram. 

I learned that the only thing more enjoyable than watching an OK Go video is the process of making one.

And in terms of animal-specific security, it was End Love. During rehearsals, a goose – the same one that makes a cameo in the video – developed a fascination with our guitarist Andy, and when he tried to shoo it away, it drew blood pecking at his legs. 

It also tried to get in the passenger seat of his car.

Which member of the band takes the most convincing?

DK: Tim, our bassist. He’s always game, but he’s always cautious, too. We’ve been best friends since we were 11, so we know each other’s boundaries well.