FEATURE:
Reel-to-Real
to be one of the best videos ever, I have a very soft spot for OK Go’s Here It Goes Again. The song is wonderful, though it pales in comparison to the video. The one-take video is amazing to see! I have a fondness for one-take videos, as they take so much patience and concentration. Literally, if something is messed up a few seconds before the end, then they have to start again! I kicked off this feature with Michel Gondry’s one-take video for Lucas with the Lid Off (1994). I will return to the French master soon enough. Now, I want to take a closer look at the 2006 video for the fifth single of the band’s second studio album, Oh No (2005). OK Go were formed in Los Angeles, California. The band is composed of Damian Kulash (lead vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass guitar and vocals), Dan Konopka (drums and percussion), and Andy Ross (guitar, keyboards and vocals), who joined them in 2005. Before getting to a couple of articles about one of the all-time great videos, Wikipedia provide some background to the stunning Here It Goes Again clip:
“The music video of the song is an elaborate performance of the band dancing on eight treadmills, arranged in two rows of four and in alternating opposite directions, in a single continuous take. Choreographed and co-directed by the band and lead singer Damian Kulash's sister Trish Sie, it took a total of seventeen attempts to complete the video.[12] As in the band's video for "A Million Ways", Tim Nordwind lip-syncs the lead vocals instead of Damian Kulash, following the format from the dance choreographed for the song "C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips", which Tim sings. The video debuted on YouTube on July 31, 2006, and has been viewed over 53 million times. It premiered on VH1's Top 20 Countdown that same day. OK Go performed the dance routine live at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards.
The music video won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video and the 2006 YouTube awards for Most Creative Video.
In "The Must List" on the August 18, 2006, issue of Entertainment Weekly, the video was ranked number nine: "The votes have been tallied, and this year's award for Best Use of Treadmills in an Alt-Pop Music Video goes to... http://okgo.net/news.aspx". In July 2011, the music video was named one of "The 30 All-TIME Best Music Videos" by Time Magazine”.
I can understand why artists tend not to do one-take videos. They can prove time-consuming and expensive. They take a lot of rehearsal and, in some cases, people cheat and use invisible cuts and editing to masquerade as a pure one-take. I can only imagine how tiring it got for OK Go to execute and perfect the video on treadmills! Directed by Trish Sie and band member Damian Kulash, it is amazing how it all choregraphs and flows seemingly seamlessly! Consequence looked at the video in 2016 and paid tribute to its innovation ten years after its release:
“We were like, ‘Look, if we can do that by accident, then we should do it on purpose,’” Kulash says. “So I called my sister, and we tried to think up a new, more ridiculous dance. That’s when we came up with the treadmill idea.”
The plan was surprisingly sparse. They just figured they’d get eight treadmills in a room and then figure it out. As history has proven, it worked. They stowed themselves away in Sie’s Florida home for 10 days. They didn’t tell their label or their manager what they were doing for fear they’d shut it down, meaning they recorded the whole thing without a budget.
“I remember when we put up the tarp behind us, we were like, ‘It’s okay that it looks shitty. We don’t want anyone to mistake this for a real, high-budget music video,” Kulash says. Still, the band sat on the video for almost nine months with worries that it’d be too similar to the “A Million Ways” video. It eventually dropped when the band was playing a festival in Russia. Without their knowing, the label posted the video to StupidVideos.com, with the band’s guitar tech breaking the news to them.
IN THIS PHOTO: Trish Sie
“We were like, ‘Really?! What the fuck!’” Kulash recalls.
They decided to just go with it and asked the label to take it down and repost it to a new, up-and-coming site called YouTube. They’d anticipated getting the same 300,000 views they’d gotten on iFilm, maybe in a shorter time frame. Instead, it hit 900,000 views within a day.
“We honestly thought there was a decimal place wrong,” Kulash says. “It was like, holy shit. Obviously it blew up, and it was a big deal, and all of the sudden our label remembered our name and turned on the promotion machine and all that.”
The video would go on to become a pop culture phenomenon. They’d perform the treadmill dance on the MTV Video Music Awards and won a Grammy the next year for Best Short Form Music Video. It wasn’t the last the world would see of OK Go and certainly not the last video they’d make that would capture the imagination of the internet. They’d create an intricate Rube Goldberg Machine for their song “This Too Shall Pass”, choreograph a video with dogs and buckets for “White Knuckles”, and perform a routine on motorized unicycles for “I Won’t Let You Down”. The video for “Needing/Getting” required the band to personally tune 57 pianos, each string to the same single note, in a warehouse for three days.
“It’s like a runaway train, these videos,” Kulash says. “Most bands spend maybe two days on a video. It’s been a long time since we’ve only spent two months on one”.
There is another piece that is worth bringing in to highlight the genius – and genius direction – of OK Go’s video for Here It Goes Again. Stack listed some facts (perhaps unknown to many) about the vide. I have chosen a few:
“That’s correct, chums: it’s been 15 years since LA-via-Chicago four-piece OK Go released the video that injected them right into the cockles of pop culture’s heart: Here It Goes Again.
Since then, the group have become renown for their nutty clips; they’ve defied gravity, activated an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine, stretched four chaotic seconds into four beautiful minutes, and more. But right now, we’re taking it back to the low-budget beginnings, with five things you may not know about the superb clip for 2006 hit Here It Goes Again.
The dancing started as a live thing
In their early days when performing live around Chicago, OK Go would often spend their encores doing little choreographed dance routines instead of actually, y’know, playing songs. “We wanted something… so ridiculous that people couldn’t forget that they had seen it,” frontman Damian Kulash told NPR in 2005. “My sister is the person who is so ridiculous that no one can forget that they’ve seen her, so we thought we’d call her in and see what she could do.”
There was another viral one-shot video before this one
Call in his sis Damian did, and Trish Sie – who herself is a professional choreographer and former championship ballroom dancer – was instantly into it. “Everybody on the planet likes to watch men dance, especially men who don’t dance for a living,” she’s said. “There’s just something kinda wrong about it. People love that.” In 2005 Trish filmed the boys practising in Kulash’s backyard, so they could watch the video back and see their own progress. The group uploaded the delightfully dorky footage to YouTube as the clip for their song A Million Ways, and rabid public interest did the rest.
The choreography was created espesh for these treadmills
The treadmills in the clip are are Vision Fitness T9600 and T9700 models, which Trish rented and set up in her spare room. She then choreographed the dance specifically for these models. “They have the circular arms which are perfect for jumping on and off, we can slide through them easily… now,” Kulash has said.
Of 21 attempts, they got through it perfectly three times
Eight treadmills, arranged in two rows of four, and going in alternating-opposite directions. Someone’s going to be mucking something up at some point, right? And yet the band managed to get it spot-on three whole times. Bravo!”.
I shall leave it there. OK Go and have done a few ambitious and brilliant videos, but none quite as memorable and unmatched as Here It Goes Again! I really love the video and, if you are looking to do something different and eye-catching, why not do a one-take/shot?! Maybe it does take more time and luck, but it is rewarding looking back at a single shot, knowing there have not been so many cuts, camera angles and post-production editing. With full commitment from OK Go and superb direction from Damian Kulash and Trish Sie, this 2006 diamond is…
A video masterpiece.