iPhones in the music video for ‘A Stone Only Rolls Downhill’ – Image Credit: OK Go
OK Go’s latest music video for “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” uses 64 iPhones and an awful lot of planning and effort.
OK Go is a band known for coming up with unique music videos, with the eye-catching efforts aiming to get viewers and listeners for being creative and unusual.
This has ranged from orchestrations on running machines to dancing with motorized unicycles, to careful filming on a zero-gravity flight.
The band’s latest effort is based around a lot of iPhones.
The video for “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill,” published to YouTube on Thursday, braces the viewer for yet another creative effort by saying it’s made using “64 Videos on 64 Phones.” It’s then replaced by an iPhone on a concrete background, playing a video of band member Damian Kulash walking into frame and singing.
Shortly, more iPhones are brought in, with the singer walking between them, then placing limbs so they extend from one screen to another. Not long after, more members appear in various poses and performing multi-screen actions.
More iPhones are pushed onscreen, with more visual effects performed using all of the cameras filming at the same time. By framing the image and with precise timing, other effects such as a video mosaic of the same face are performed.
In an interlude, it’s revealed that the group shot is shown on an iPhone, which is also filmed and displayed on an iPhone, and so on. The recursive screen-in-screen effect is brought to an end by the formation of a 42-iPhone arrangement.
After more multiscreen, multi-camera effects, the video ends with the singer alone in a room without any visible equipment.
In a behind-the-scenes video from Project Management Institute, it is claimed that the video is produced by 64 one-take shots, which are then played back while arranged on the floor. Filming was a challenge, with the team needing to work out how each video has to be filmed to achieve the final desired effect when used as a whole.
It took 1,043 takes across eight days to complete the video, with 577 hours of preparation by 31 people. All for a 3-minute-19-second music video.
