OK GO + Rube Goldberg = Amazing Video

[AlsoNamedBort]

@WarmNPrickly

I do give the video credit for the glasses chime. It is clear that this was done as is specifically because, in my opinion, the timing was less than perfect. It was just good enough. I don’t know exactly how the song goes, but the fact that they stop playing for the chimes is clearly the only way they could make it work. That is very clever.

It was also a call back to their very first video, where they did the same thing playing ping pong (albeit done with video editing).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BxfpbyV-uc (ping pong part comes around 1:50)

[GrandWino]

When the ball rolls forward right after the curtain, it is definitely rolling uphill, which makes me think that they do go from the first floor of the warehouse up to the second floor by “Goldbergian” means.

[MovieMogul]

Not a single take, but here’s another music video with some ingenious Goldbergian devices throughout the song.

[Ogre]

@HelloNinja

When the ball rolls forward right after the curtain, it is definitely rolling uphill, which makes me think that they do go from the first floor of the warehouse up to the second floor by “Goldbergian” means.

Huh? I see absolutely no evidence that this is true.

[GrandWino]

No? Maybe I’m seeing things but it looks pretty clear to me that the ball is moving at an upward trajectory at that point. Not steep enough to go from the base of one floor to the other, but if it was starting closer near the ceiling, it would work.

[GrandWino]

Sorry, I was wrong…just rewatched and its obvious that it starts on 2nd floor and then drops down to the bottom floor right before the curtain. Still looks like the ball is rolling “up” to me though.

[Indistinguishable]

@Indistinguishable

I like how they’re all covered in paint from the start of the video, though. Some subtle acknowledgement that it takes multiple takes to get a thing like this right.

Although it does also surprisingly indicate that they at least ran some of those discarded takes all the way to the end…

[CaveMike]

@WarmNPrickly

The Honda commercial is better on two levels:

1. The events in the Honda commercial require extreme precision and perfect behavior of every little bolt. The slope of the rolls had to be just perfect. In fact, each mechanism was clearly designed to be right on the edge of failure. The events in the video are all brute force with nothing particularly delicate.

2. It is unambiguously one shot, and all of the cause and effect mechanisms are clear.

Huh? The Honda video was two shots.

[Quercus_alba]

@Crawlspace

I thought it was leaps and bounds better than the Honda commercial, which was filmed in two shots and in a perfectly straight line. Here the camera changes direction to follow the action and the sound effects have to be timed just right in order to fit the music.

Plus the band members have to keep changing positions when they’re off-camera.

[WarmNPrickly]

@CaveMike

Huh? The Honda video was two shots.

I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about. It looks like one shot to me.

[Mahaloth]

Wow. Impressive.

[cochrane]

@WarmNPrickly

The Honda commercial is better on two levels:

1. The events in the Honda commercial require extreme precision and perfect behavior of every little bolt. The slope of the rolls had to be just perfect. In fact, each mechanism was clearly designed to be right on the edge of failure. The events in the video are all brute force with nothing particularly delicate.

2. It is unambiguously one shot, and all of the cause and effect mechanisms are clear.

@CaveMike

Huh? The Honda video was two shots.

CaveMike is correct. According to The Guardian, it would have been too expensive to shoot it in one take.

Sorry to taint the wow factor slightly, but the answer is no. The sequence of events in the advert is actually split into two shots - shooting the whole thing in one go would have been too expensive.

“It was a damage limitation idea to snip it into two [parts],” says Rob Steiner, head of television at Wieden & Kennedy, the agency responsible for the advert.
.
.
.
Still not found the join? The first section ends and the second one begins at the one minute mark when an exhaust box rolls off to the right of the screen. Some clever editing bridges the two parts.)

[Achren]

@ArchiveGuy

Not a single take, but here’s another music video with some ingenious Goldbergian devices throughout the song.

Post 32.

[WarmNPrickly]

@cochrane

CaveMike is correct. According to The Guardian, it would have been too expensive to shoot it in one take.

Well, that’s disappointing. Even so, the delicate nature of the events in the Honda commercial make me put that ahead of this video. That and the fact that cause and effect for each transition is really unclear in the music video.

[ianzin]

@HelloNinja

When the ball rolls forward right after the curtain, it is definitely rolling uphill

‘Definitely’ is a word to be used with care, especially when the illusory effect you are referring to is at least one hundred years old.

See this reference from ‘Popular Mechanics’ back in 1909. If you can view Quicktime files, here’s a movie of the effect.

[Skott]

Some friends and I put together a Rube Goldberg device that’s maybe 1/20th as complex as that. It took us three straight days to get one cut without any errors. I can only imagine what type of horror it was to get that one right take. Very impressive! I’d love to see some of the takes that didn’t work.

[mr.jp]

@Skott

Some friends and I put together a Rube Goldberg device

That was amazing.

[Unintentionally_Blank]

It’s two shots in the Honda commercial…and again, I say: So what? Is it any less an accomplishment?

[ianzin]

@Unintentionally_Blank

It’s two shots in the Honda commercial…and again, I say: So what? Is it any less an accomplishment?

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, some people might take the view that it is at least slightly less of an accomplishment than if it had all been done in one take.

Presumably the people who made it feel this way, which is why they bothered to use digital trickery in the middle to make two shots look like one. If they felt ‘two shots are just as good as one’, they wouldn’t have bothered.

Going off at a slight tangent, while I’m sure that Honda’s ‘Cog’ was praised for all sorts of reasons, both within and without the ad industry, I’m not sure it was necessarily a very good advert for Honda.

First of all, it was so long that the full-length version was only broadcast once or twice, at horrific expense. After that, Honda quickly moved to booking shorter ad slots where they could only show a small portion of the entire sequence - which sort of defeats the object.

Now, the ad agency would say, ‘Ah, but we’re in a new era where ads have a life beyond broadcast TV, and this ad will be seen a gazillion times on the internet and people will be talking about it for a long time’. However, it’s one thing to have a million people on the internet, ‘Wow! What a cool ad!’. It’s quite another to have people interested in buying a car from Honda.

Secondly, the one thing people know about this ad is that it took hundreds of takes to get it right. To me, this undermines the tag line, ‘Isn’t it nice when everything just… works’. I don’t know about you, but I want to drive a car where everything ‘just works’ the first time, especially the brakes, rather than on the 615th attempt.

Thirdly, most people know that it wasn’t an original idea. It was derived from The Way Things Go. ‘Cog’ can be praised for many reasons, but not for being a new, original idea.

For these reasons and more, I think ‘Cog’ is a neat, fascinating piece of video, but not necessarily a great advert.

[TheFifthYear]

@Unintentionally_Blank

It’s two shots in the Honda commercial…and again, I say: So what? Is it any less an accomplishment?

Still an amazing commercial, but yes, of course it’s less of an accomplishment.