With its innovative, eye-catching videos, OK Go has spent its career making people wonder how in the hell it did that cool stuff. That trend continues with the group’s latest clip, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” in which the members of the pop rock quartet are seeing bouncing around what appears to be the cabin of a private plane, unencumbered by their own weight, gravity just nonsense now. The band’s videos have never relied on post-production trickery or hidden wires in the past, and “Upside Down” maintains the what-you-see-is-what-you-get tradition, as revealed in an article at Red Bull’s official website. There, lead singer Damian Kulash and his sister, “Upside Down” co-director Trish Sie, talk about how the groundbreaking video came to be.
Filming a zero-G clip had been a long-term goal for Kulash and Sie ever since a visit to NASA in 2012, they say, but “Upside Down” did not become a reality until a Russian company called S7 stepped in and declared that it was, in Sie’s words, “dead serious about funding our dream video.” Soon enough, the members of OK Go and their crew were headed to Moscow to be flown in gravity-defying parabolas by a team of 10 pilots. Kulash was adamant about doing choreographed moves and not assembling the video out of lots of little cuts, but the very brief periods of weightlessness forced him to cut the song into manageable parts. Such flights are known colloquially as “vomit comets,” but did anyone actually puke during the making of this video? Not the members of OK Go, Kulash says, but the experience was hardly vomit-free. “Of course,” he said, “given roughly 25-30 people on the plane and over the course of the 20 flights we did, we think there were 58 times that people puked. So it was averaging two to three per flight.”