Video: OK Go makes music weightlessly

Here’s a cool music video of the song Upside Down & Inside Out from the band OK Go. It was filmed on a S7 Airlines aircraft flying a series of parabolic trajectories, which provide periods of 20-25 seconds of weightlessness.

[ Update: This is the third video link I’ve posted here. The other two were each disconnected eventually due to copyright issues with OK Go’s record company. I hope this is finally the official video:

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As seen in this diagram, the “zero-g” periods are when the plane coasts over the top of the ballistic trajectory. You pay for this when the plane pulls up and your weight nearly doubles.

Zero_gravity_flight_trajectory_C9-565

Usually people lay down flat during those heavy times. I had assumed the video makers had done an excellent job of  weaving a series of segments seamlessly together to make it look like a continuous performance. However, articles about the video say it was actually shot in one continuous take. The band members and stewardess actors steadfastly stood or sat upright and tolerated the extra weight without changing their expressions. It took a lot of planning and practice to make this video.

[ Update 2: Yep, that’s what they did: Behind-The-Scenes Of OK Go’s Zero Gravity “Upside Down & Inside Out” Video – Stereogum

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.”

Update: Watching the video again, it is obvious that it was not a continuous take. One can see where a weightless period ends and then immediately continues into another weightless segment. So they have edited out most of the time that the performers were weighed down.]

Articles about the video:

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