Therapy Studios helps OK Go celebrate its 10th year of making pioneering music videos with the release of the band’s most ambitious clip yet. OK Go singer/filmmaker Damian Kulash, Jr. and frequent collaborator filmmaker Trish Sie of Bob Industries directed the video for the infectious track “Upside Down & Inside Out.” The clip was shot in zero gravity in the skies above Russia, with S7 Airlines signing on to support the band’s dream to make a weightless video. Together, they proceeded with a lyric from the song as their motto: “Gravity is just a habit.”
“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 total gravity change meant a musical number for the history books, resulting in a film of mind-bending, perspective-warping action that unfolds in a colorful frenzy.
“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.”
Therapy Studios was enlisted early on to help Sie and Kulash figure out how to best capture the material. Editor Meg Ramsay cut the test footage together to see how close the band had to hit their marks in order to make the edit with the final product. Then the band and crew returned to Russia to shoot the real thing.
OK GO mastered the challenge, floating around the interior of the plane and handling the props with spot-on precision. This allowed Meg to cut or speed through all the reset periods to create one full take where the routine is continuous, culminating in a gloriously messy climax of music and paint-splattered pandemonium.
Wren Waters, Lead Flame Artist/Partner, and his team at Therapy Studios split the finishing and morphing duties with Ryan McNeely, Creative Director/Partner at Design & VFX company Visual Creatures and his team. Together they completed eight morphs in total, tying the shots together and refining each transition to make it as seamless as possible. Finally, the footage was handed off to Therapy colorist Bob Curreri, who enhanced the Technicolor acrobatics that unfold onscreen.
View “Upside Down & Inside Out” video HERE.
