OK Go – The One Moment
2016 · Directed by Damian Kulash
307K Likes
Best comments
1.“Whenever people ask me what my favorite table salt commercial is, this is generally my go-to answer.”
More comments
- 2.“From their website: 'Did you really blow up all those guitars? Yes, but they were already being scrapped by Fender for not meeting quality control standards. No playable guitars were harmed in the making of this video.'”
- 3.“Cleaning staff: 'I really hate this band...'”
The story
Everything in this video happens in 4.2 seconds. Then OK Go spends four minutes showing you what you missed. Singer Damian Kulash directed it, and the band packed more than 300 separate events into that sliver of time: exploding guitars, 128 gold water balloons, 54 bursts of salt, 23 buckets of paint, shattering glass and giant flip books. The whole thing plays in real time at the start, then slows down to the length of the song.
No single camera rig could move fast enough, so they used high-speed cameras on robotic arms and stitched together seven connected camera moves. Frame rates ran from 60 frames per second up to 6,000 when the guitars blow apart. The timing lived on a spreadsheet 400 rows long. Prep and filming took about seven weeks. For a moment shorter than a sneeze.
The song came from the band's 2014 album Hungry Ghosts, and it's about how short everything is and why that makes each moment count. Morton Salt paid for the video as part of its Walk Her Walk campaign, and the Morton Salt Girl shows up at the end. It pulled 6.4 million Facebook views in its first two days, and the song climbed to number nine on Billboard's Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart. Life is short. OK Go made it shorter, then stretched it out so we could see.
