More than just OK

[greatbear]

I love music. I love machines. I love silliness. And I love stuff that just makes me smile. Now put all four of these together in one place and I have an excuse to love life a little bit more. The band OK Go put together a video to go along with their song "This Too Shall Pass". The video has the band singing the song while a giant Rube Goldberg Machine does, well, it's thing. Kicker here is, they timed the various machine events to sync perfectly with the song. Amazing stuff, and loads of fun to watch.

This was shot in one continuous take using a Steadicam and following the action. Of course, it took a few tries to get right, but when it works, it's practically captivating.

This video is close to unseating the Honda "Cog" ad as my favorite Rube Goldberg machine video.

Comments

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

You know the Honda cog ad was a rip off of 2 artists work? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Go They successfully sued...I knew when I saw the Honda ad as I watched transfixed to the original music-less speech-less 10 minute one-shot piece.

BTW I/we call that a Heath Robinson machine, a term that predates it...I hadn't heard of Rube Goldberg until this video started popping up my feeds...

Reminds me more of Mousetrap! :-D

[texaspenguin.livejournal.com]

OMG - wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men!!!

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

BTW watched it a few times...that is a genius video. Interesting it's taken them 4 years and probably a lot of money to match the treadmills...;-)

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Very incredible indeed and the song is kind of cool too.

[redmoonriver.livejournal.com]

I enjoy Ok Go's music decently. But I'm madly in love with their off-kilter style of videos. Sheer brilliance behind that.

[champdaddy.livejournal.com]

too cool!

[tbrough.livejournal.com]

This is 57 shades of awesome. I really like OK Go (even if the new album is a bit duff), and I have to repost this.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Ever since that episode, I think of that every time I see one of those things. X-D

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I love these things because they are real. You can fake a machine with computer graphics and editing, but it's never the same. The whole idea is that these things must work in real life. But to sync it up to a song like this? Awesomeness.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

It's worth several replays.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Song is catchy and fun, but it is perfect for this somehow.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

There is a lot of thought and fun engineering behind this. It's controlled mayhem. Gives me more respect for the band too.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Yep! And it's worth replaying many times over. Especially in fullscreen HD to pick up all the details.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

THough I have heard the song mostly in background before, this video makes me want to listen to more stuff. It's good pop.

[dan4behr.livejournal.com]

Ya snooze, ya lose!

I was going to post this exact same thing! I too, was a great fan of the Honda cog commercial and I love the OKGo video as well.

I thought about posting both and making comparing the two - but went to bed instead. Oh, well!

BTW, have you checked out the "live" version of the song? The one with the Notre Dame Marching band? That's another 'one-shot video' and almost equally creative.

(and why oh why can't we get s sweet Honda euro-wagon like the the one featured in "Cog" as opposed to the dreadful Crosstour?)

[cpj.livejournal.com]

That was pretty cool.

[eric-mathgeek.livejournal.com]

OMG that's awesome! Thanks!

[mikiedoggie.livejournal.com]

The planning to get that one continuous shot lined up with the music must have been crazy hard to plan. I love it.

[beastbriskett.livejournal.com]

WOW!
Thanks for sharing this! I love how the gadgets get bigger and more dangerous, until they're tossing cars and bowling balls. WHEEEE!

[bonkishnurtaz.livejournal.com]

Happy severely belated birthday, Phil! HUGS!!!!

[msclwolf.livejournal.com]

Whooooo hooooo we likeeeee, we likeee lots :)

[rockybear02.livejournal.com]

OK that was totally awesome - thanks for sharing Phil

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

More interesting than the video for me is some of the background:

that OK Go video you nearly never saw: EMI and the embedding wars: http://www.radioclashblog.com/archives/2010/03/08/that-ok-go-video-state-who/

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

It was actually this story that led me to this video a while back, I kept wanting to put it on my blog but kept forgetting. The whole issue with media companies exercising insane control over their so-called properties is angering at best. I am to the point where I could not care less about a company's 'rights' to their assets when they refuse to adapt to a changing business and consumption model. Post the shite and copy it as much as possible. The real talent will come from people like OK Go who get their music into the world with creativity and cleverness and somehow outside of the big media factory machine.

I read a couple articles a little while ago regarding a movie critic named Roger Ebert. Many years ago he and his show partner Gene Siskel would reveiw movies, the program was Siskel and Ebert At The Movies, the most memorable item that came from the show was the "Thumbs Up" (or down, in many cases). Two thumbs up means they both liked it, and these rather stodgy critics were always in good point/counterpoint with each other. A while back, Siskel died at 53 from a brain tumor. Ebert was devastated, still is. He is in the news lately because he had his lower jaw removed due to cancer. Still the outspoken (though muted now aside from typing words onto a screen) critic and missing his friend, he gave an interview here. It's a touching piece, moreso if you knew the two from their shows and their constant banter over the years. But I got very, very angry when I had reached this part:

Gene Siskel taped his last show, and within a week or two he was dead. Ebert had lost half his identity.

He scrolls down to the entry's final paragraph.

We once spoke with Disney and CBS about a sitcom to be titled "Best Enemies." It would be about two movie critics joined in a love/hate relationship. It never went anywhere, but we both believed it was a good idea. Maybe the problem was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.

Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: "Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted." Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what's happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it's not sadness surfacing. He's shaking. It's anger.

Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. "Those fu — " she says, catching herself.

They think it's Disney again — that they've taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation.

This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn't press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they're just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he's still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he's shouting now. He's standing outside on the street corner and he's arching his back and he's shouting at the top of his lungs.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

(con't, damn 4300 character limit)

The goon squad from Disney/ABC removed the videos simply for their cause, not even paying any mind that the one who posted them was the subject, and that these were done as a memorial. No, the terms of use trump all. Well, I am now entirely sick to death of such shit, and I dont care if these media companies go bankrupt from losing all their control. I support as much independent art as I can. The corporate stuff can go to hell. The lawyers can die in a fire. And I will occasionally pirate stuff simply from spite. Enough of this monetizing every fucking nanosecond.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed!

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And LTNS! How's things?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Search up some more of their stuff. It's all good.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

This is so much like something I would do. It's practically perfect. It was nine thousand kinds of fun to watch and make, apparently.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

They make it seem so easy though. Watching this was like the golden days of MTV, where videos could be lots of fun to watch. I bet Peter Gabriel is smiling somewhere.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's never a competition. Spread the fun! I actually goofed and forgot to put the links in for the marching band video, their first one with the treadmills (so simple, yet so entertaining and clever) and how this one was made.

The Crosstour and so many of these crossover SUV things are nasty. Wagons are cool, are practical and don't have to be family trucksters. The Dodge Magnum was cool. It would be easy for the various manufacturers to give us a lot of the cool Euro-rides, but instead listen too much to their marketing departments.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

My pleasure!

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

wow, that's a wonderfully moving article - I didn't know Ebert was so ill...

But yeah, it's happened again and again - artists, musicians and indeed presenters denied from showing their own work, or even getting a DMCA for stuff they own (it's apparently all arranged for big companies, they can't seem to understand that stuff claimed automatically by a corporate might not be owned by them).

The DMCA counter-claim process is laughable - see my post with the Lessig; he talks about that mid-way through. It's horrendous.

http://www.radioclashblog.com/archives/2010/03/08/lawrence-lessig-i-was-a-teenage-republican-cc-supporter/

But as you say the human side is missing; as is the understanding that a digital copy is not the same as me stealing a CD, no-one is deprived of a copy; just a notional idea of whether I would've bought it (usually not, sometimes a copy encourages me to buy it)...and that our world is now made of cultural and 'owned media' and to not comment, create, remix or have any stake in that other than passivity makes us all a second-class citizen.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Actually, they didn't sue, for they knew doing so would be futile.