This article explains how the OK Go music video for Upside Down & Inside Out (see earlier post) was made using a Russian aircraft flying parabolic trajectories: How OK Go Made That Amazing Zero-G Video – Jalopnik.

This video also is about the making of the Upside Down… video:

[ Update: The original 30+ minute video went down due to copyright issues. Here is a shorter one about the making of the video.

See also this translated press release from S7 Airlines about the video: Group OK Go and S7 Airlines [make] the first professional music video in weightlessness – S7 Airlines (Google Translate) –

Interesting facts from the set … :
* 3 weeks filming
* 21 flight
* 70 Staff
* 15 professional instructors
* 2 professional air gymnasts
* Crane with a telescopic 7-meter boom, in which the camera was mounted
* about 2000 balls and other props units, which were used during the training and survey flights
* 2 KAMAZ [trucks] for transportation of scenery

]

This video shows outtakes of several attempts to do the final scene with the paint-filled balloon:

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:

]

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.

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:

• OK Go’s Latest Mind-Bending Video Puts the Band in Zero-G – Popular Mechanics
• Watch OK Go Fly Weightless In Their New Music Video – TechCrunch
• Why Ok Go’s new low-gravity music video is so impressive – Business Insider

The band Suzerain released a cover of David Bowie’s song Space Oddity in honour of Astronaut Tim Peake‘s launch to the International Space Station on Tuesday: Space Oddity (David Bowie Cover) by SUZERAIN

Peake is the first “official” UK government supported astronaut to go to space. Here is a video of his Soyuz rocket lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.  In the Soyuz spacecraft with Peake were Expedition 46-47 Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA Flight Engineer Tim Kopra

And here is a video of the Soyuz spacecraft approaching and docking with the ISS six hours after launch: