Behind-The-Scenes Of OK Go’s Zero Gravity “Upside Down & Inside Out” Video
OK Go’s music videos always come out executed flawlessly, which means that the level of planning that goes into them is downright absurd. If you haven’t already, you should go watch the band’s new video for “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which features the power-poppers and two S7 Airlines flight attendants trained as aerial acrobats somersaulting around in zero gravity. To create this spectacle, OK Go spent three weeks testing and filming at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center for ROSCOSMOS, the Russian equivalent of NASA. An Il-76 MDK airplane is capable of flying in parabolic maneuvers to generate brief periods of weightlessness, but these periods only last up to 27 seconds, and the song is over three minutes long. “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, who directed the clip with her brother, OK Go frontman Damien Kulash, Jr. “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.” Check out some behind-the-scenes footage from the last segment of the shoot below.
It looks like a blast, but man, it must’ve been a real bitch to clean the entire plane after every take.