The iPhone video from "OK Go" is as complicated as it is brilliant
A well-known music group takes the "Shot on iPhone" concept to the extreme: the ingenious video for "A Stone Only Rolls Downhill" will leave your head spinning.
The American indie band "OK Go" is known for special music videos without special effects. The group shot the clip for their new track "A Stone Only Rolls Downhill" using smartphones - more precisely, 64 identical iPhones in various split-screen arrangements. The result is a creative masterpiece with a dizzyingly complex concept that is reminiscent of Matryoshka dolls.
Your spatial imagination must be very strong now. As a little mental exercise, you can first look at the end result and think about what the setup behind it looked like. Oh yes, one more note: Only one single one-take runs on each iPhone. In other words, a continuous clip without editing. If you have any brain power left, count the smartphones and see if you can come up with 64. Ready? OK Go.
In case your head hasn't exploded, here are a few facts: 31 people worked on the project, investing 577 hours of preparation. A total of 1043 takes were then filmed within 8 days. The iPhones are likely to be last year's 15 Pro - it already has the Action Button, but no Camera Control yet. [doSIM].
As usual with OK Go, you get a look behind the scenes in a second video. In it, singer Damian Kulash describes the project as a series of convoluted problems. "Anyone can have crazy ideas. The hard part is actually realising them."
"We have invested time and effort so that you get three minutes of "wow" - and a feeling of joy about other people in the world," says Kulash. The team may have achieved this goal. The video has already been viewed 1.5 million times within five days on YouTube alone.
Finally, here are three older strokes of genius from OK Go, in case you didn't know them yet or want to see them again:
My fingerprint often changes so drastically that my MacBook doesn't recognise it anymore. The reason? If I'm not clinging to a monitor or camera, I'm probably clinging to a rockface by the tips of my fingers.