Defying Gravity: Behind the Scenes of OK Go’s Spacey New Music...

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Defying Gravity: Behind the Scenes of OK Go’s Spacey New Music Video

To see more of OK Go’s video, check out @okgo on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

The band OK Go (@okgo) was walking through the cosmetics aisle at a local store, trying to decide what liquids look good floating in zero gravity.

“If you squeeze a tube of toothpaste, can you make a wire sculpture with it?” asked lead singer Damian Kulash (@damiankulash). “Or is it just going to come out sideways like you’re used to and just sort of hang there? If you break an egg in the air, does it look like you think it’s going to look?”

They were prepping for their spacey new music video, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which would be shot during a parabolic flight over Russia. Because when you’ve danced on treadmills, been shot with paint cannons, driven into a series of pianos and led an 8-mile (13-kilometer) musical parade through the streets of Los Angeles, all in the name of art, you have to keep things interesting.

“There is no explicit desire to top ourselves for anyone else’s sake,” said Damian, about the band’s ability to dish out viral video after viral video. “We don’t really mean it to, but things that seemed really ambitious and crazy to us five years ago seem normal to us now. So it’s just a question of keeping ourselves challenged and thrilled.”

For the “Upside Down & Inside Out” video, they certainly had their work cut out for them. During parabolic flights, you experience weightlessness in only 30-second increments, meaning the video would have to be split up as such. And the possibility of the group practicing all of their moves beforehand was difficult since the methods available — underwater training, wires — didn’t specifically mimic the conditions they were going to experience.

Then there was the issue of nausea. Sitting in an airplane that goes up at a 45-degree angle, levels off, then goes back down at a 45-degree angle, all in the span of four minutes, will typically make your stomach want to punch itself. Though the group ended up holding down their lunches, the rest of the crew wasn’t as lucky. Over a series of 21 flights, there were 58 unscheduled episodes of vomiting.

“The two things that can make it a lot worse are spinning a lot — which of course we were doing the whole time — or trying to concentrate on something tiny, like the screen of an MP3 player,” said Damian. “So our poor audio playback guy, he was strapped down to his chair with the playback system in front of him. There were several flights where he puked twice but he never f—ed up. He’s amazing.”

Damian had a one-up on everyone, though, having gone on a parabolic flight around 2011 with his sister Trish (the video’s co-director), for the explicit reason of seeing whether you could shoot a music video in zero-G. Though he began pitching the concept around, the price range was way outside what the band or label could afford. Then last summer, S7 airlines came to the rescue.

“It was in June and they reached out to us and were like, ‘What kind of collaborative video would you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘You have airplanes!’”

Though the airline was surprisingly open to giving the band full creative reign, there was some trepidation in the beginning, particularly from the more buttoned up pilots operating the aircraft.

“While they wound up being super, super helpful and totally into this, there was some skepticism by these cosmonauts — who are real scientists and do real training — whose plane had been hired and saw us throwing super balls and squirting balloons at each other,” said Damian. “They are like, this is bullsh–.”

The band managed to win them over, and after six months of logistical planning, two weeks of flights (in terms of the zero-G experience, the band did two to three times what a normal cosmonaut does for training in the span of 14 days) and an untold volume of puke, they got exactly what they came for: a final video featuring the entire band and two acrobats doing a choreographed dance, while mini disco balls, piñatas, candy and balloons filled with paint float through the air.

So where in the world does OK Go head after this? Though Damian says they’re not always looking to up the ante with their music videos, even he admits to being a bit stumped.

“Trying to think of what will challenge and thrill us internally as much as something this demonstrably insane is hard,” he said. “Obviously I know to most of the world we are that video band. But we spend a lot of our time writing and performing and recording music, and we spend a lot of our time chasing creative ideas that aren’t these videos, so I am not at all scared that we are going to run out of things that we aren’t creatively excited about.”

—Instagram @music

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