OK Go’s New Music Video Was Filmed on 64 iPhones

OK Go, an American rock band known for making innovative music videos, have released yet another mind-bending video for their latest single A Stone Only Rolls Downhill involving 64 videos shot on 64 iPhones.

In the conceptual video, the phones are laid out next to one another so they form a mosaic that comes together as one big picture. “It took us more than 1,000 takes to get the 64,” the band’s lead singer Damian Kulash tells The Kelly Clarkson Show.

Kulash says that the total screen time that appears in the four-minute video adds up to two hours and 20 minutes. The conceptual video left fans baffled but impressed; even Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted to call it “incredible.”

“The idea of this video is ‘split screen’ but instead of having that be a digital thing across one screen, we literally shot 64 one-take shots on phones,” explains Kulash in a behind-the-scenes video.

Once all the takes had been filmed, all the phones were laid out on the floor and shot as “one big practical film.” Kulash characterizes the project as “just a giant set of tasks.”

“It’s a whole bunch of nested problems,” he says. “You’ve got this one big picture that’s made up of 42 little pictures, but one of those actually has another 10 pictures in it and one of those has 14 pictures in it…What do you have to shoot before what?”

The indie rock singer says that fundamentally the video is a “very simple idea, multiplied times 42 levels of complexity.”

“So it’s like how do you break these individual things out so that they can be not only attacked and solved but attacked and solved playfully and creatively?” he says.

Over the course of eight days, the team filmed 1,043 takes but that also included 577 hours of preparation and 31 collaborators who helped pull it all together.

Music Video Trailblazers

Millennial rockers OK Go were among the first adopters of internet music videos. Their 2006 song Here It Goes Again went viral before going viral was really a thing. The four-piece band performed the song with the help of eight treadmills.

Since then, OK Go has released a string of entertaining music videos that are often low budget and filmed in just one take.