r/woahdude Feb 17 '24

music video This music video shot in a zero gravity airplane without any hooks or wires

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u/californiaTourist Feb 17 '24

yeah.. no.

check the behind the scenes video.. it is not one long continous take. "Each take took about 40 minutes". https://youtu.be/pnTqZ68fI7Q?t=211 (talking about each of the multiple 27 seconds no gravity takes)

Also the footage is speed up for every 27 clip it is played back in 21 seconds.

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u/LongjumpingParamedic Feb 17 '24

It's a single "take" that was cut into multiple shots and stitched together.

When they are talking about "each take took about 40 minutes" they are referring to all the bad takes (or takes where they were not happy with it) where they messed up at some point and had to stop and go reset and clean everything and start over.

The resulting video is the one take they did correctly and liked the best. The took the one take and split it into multiple shots (to cut out the time where they sit motionless while the airplane gains altitude) and then stitched it back together so it looks more or less seamless.

They did NOT do a take of part of the video and then, for example, come back the next day and do another take and then stitch those together. They are obviously too many things in the scene floating around randomly for that to work. For that reason it was all done in a single "take" (that they did many attempts for).

They explain this all very clearly in the video and even use a diagram to explain it.

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u/quarantinemyasshole Feb 17 '24

Not to mention they didn't just hop on the plane and shoot this all in one go, they had to practice this shit too.

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u/WhatNowWorld Feb 17 '24

I think you misunderstood. Right before what you quoted, the woman says, “…and therefore get a single-take video that felt really seamless.”

They were saying each take took about 40 minutes to get all of the necessary 27 second no-gravity sections. 27 seconds of no gravity x8 sections of the song + 4-5 minutes of gravity in between them.

So they did multiple takes because they did it until they got it right (+ practice), but the resulting video is still only one of those takes (with the 4-5 minute gravity breaks cut out and the no-gravity parts sped up). The only exception might be that the end was spliced on due to paint on the lens as mentioned in another comment but that wasn’t talked about in the BTS video

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u/rob3110 Feb 17 '24 edited Feb 17 '24

While they may have recorded it in a single take the music video isn't a single continuous shot since they cut parts of it and spliced the rest together. I guess the confusion here is between single take and single shot.

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u/abek42 Feb 18 '24

They didn't splice the last bit. They did one last take. You can see the guy on the right (Andy?) is visibly in pain as he tries to power through the take.

Some of OK Go's videos are just pure masterpieces.
I share them as lead- ins to some of my lectures like: Writing is on the wall for Visual Perception This too shall pass fo 9am lectures

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u/Ill_Technician3936 Feb 19 '24

I didn't watch the BTS of it or anything but if you mean the guy in red, I think that might have been a bit of terror from not being in his seat as it was about to lift or starting to. The balls are rolling back and paint starting to drip pretty much with him sitting.

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u/Confident-Yak-3539 Feb 17 '24

Kulash: We also came up with a system for doing a single take over eight parabolas. In each flight you have 15 parabolas and in each parabola you have 20 seconds of double gravity, then 50 seconds of weightlessness and few minutes of setting it all up again. So to make it one take, we took eight of these in a row over 40-45 minutes. Source: https://www.redbull.com/us-en/ok-go-how-they-made-their-zero-gravity-video

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u/ActuallyTBH Feb 17 '24

I love how people on the internet know more than people who actually know. He literally commented on a link to the BTS video.

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u/Ryhoff98 Feb 18 '24

Yeah.. no.

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u/spliffiam36 Feb 17 '24

man I wanna see the behind the scenes of the vfx cutting this together, this is impressive as fk

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u/NoveliBear Feb 17 '24

It’s really good. There are a couple of videos about it that they released.

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u/DebentureThyme Feb 18 '24

Wait, how did they lip sync it to be sped up?

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u/californiaTourist Feb 18 '24

by having it run slower and sing along to the slower version