This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine
“This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine” was the second video done for OK Go’s album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The single was released in January 2010 and the band made the unusual decision to create two official videos for the album, both of which premiered on YouTube.
The first video records a live performance of the song in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Marching Band. For the second the band wanted “a giant machine that we dance with”.
It features a four-minute sequence of a song being played in time to the movements of a giant Rube Goldberg machine built over two storeys of a warehouse.
Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson Dance in their Graves
Rube Goldberg is the American equivalent of Britain’s Heath Robinson. American inventor and cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was famous for his cartoons of intricately complicated over-engineered machines that manage to perform very simple tasks in hundreds of unnecessary mechanically inspired movements.
The sequence is carefully orchestrated but appears to be a single shot, following the convoluted route of objects along the machine. The contraption consists of more than 700 household objects which create a route estimated to be over half a mile long.
Parts of the machine are synchronised in time with the music, with members of the band singing alongside the machine and being shot at by paint guns in the grand finale.
This Too Shall Pass on YouTube
The video “This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine” appeared on YouTube on 2nd March 2010 and was viewed over 900,000 times on its first day, and reached 6 million views in six days…it has now been viewed over 30,876,540
times.
It was named both “Video of the Year” and “Best Rock Video” at the 3rd annual UK Music Video Awards
The Band: OK GO
The lead singer of the band Damien Kulashwas was attending the Interlichen Arts Camp to study graphic design and while there met, met the bassist Tim Nordwind who was there to study music. The name “OK GO” was inspired by their art teacher saying: “OK…Go! while they were drawing.
Kulash and Nordwindmet the band’s former guitarist and keyboardist Any Duncan in high school, and their drummer and percussionist Dan Konopka in college, and launched the band in 1998.
In 2005 Andy Ross – guitar, keyboards and vocals, joined them and replaced Andy Duncan.
Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two-story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.
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To find out more about the making of the video, the an in-depth behind-the-scenes setup of the warehouse can be seen at:
http://www.okgo.net/this-too-shall-pass-rube-goldberg-machine/
