See, this shit right here is why people keep making fun of you. You keep coming back to this idea of OK Go spending enormous amounts of time and money doing “hundreds” of takes when their own fucking blog says they took 21 flights with just eight takes.
Did anyone have “grudging partial acknowledgement of main point with doubling down on the rest”? Anyone?
No.
The main point being that the video is CG? No.
So far we have nothing to support this beyond an un-cited assumption that one flight is $200,000. Earlier in this thread, someone posted that a company is selling these flights for $5,000, which puts the total cost closer to $100k.
I was very doubtful about the no special effects claim until I read the BA explanation, which basically confirms it! Editing out the “down” segments and blending in the zero-G segments using computer editing is a special effect.
It isn’t one continuous take. It’s 8 takes spliced together. That the camera was rolling in between is immaterial.
I also suspected they fudged the timing and that was confirmed.
One of the most noticeable “that’s not right” parts to me comes right after 2:00 when the balls all sink to the floor but the guy overhead is easily bouncing off the ceiling. That has to be one of the transition points, with the below part the end of one take and the above part the start of the next.
It’s frustrating that OK Go keeps claiming continuous takes on videos that are segments spliced together.
ZeroG sell charter flights for 165K, up to 34 participants.
However, the cost doesn’t matter. The Russian airline was paying for it all and they felt it was worth it.
Where did they claim this video was a continuous take? The only claim in the video is:
Though it really does appear to be one take, in the same sense that End Love is one take (with lots of frames removed, obviously).
The balls fall to the floor and he goes down with them. He’s standing, but he’s on the ground with his feet and hands holding the chairs for stability.
Next, he keeps his hands on the seat backs and crosses his legs (lifting them up to his body, he’s ‘weightless’) and then pushes up to the ceiling and does some acrobatics up there. All this time, the balls are on the ground and mostly staying still
I assume this is where you have an issue, right?
My rebuttal is that when he moves up to the ceiling and the balls don’t, the plane is in free fall, not accelerating down. You’ll notice that he doesn’t float up to the ceiling, he pushes him self up there. Also, all of his moves on the ceiling require him to have at least a hand or foot anchored on something.
What I’m saying is that an object at rest will remain at rest unless something moves it. If the plane and the balls on the floor are falling at exactly the same speed, the balls are going to appear not to move, unless something accelerates them WRT the plane. The guy is also falling at the same speed, until he pushes himself to the ceiling, now he looks like he’s floating.
Actually, End Love was filmed in one take but it involved several cameras since no one camera could carry all that film.
The filming speed was slowed down and sped up depending on the playback effect needed.
So you want 5 minutes+ of the band sitting in the seats? All that was removed was the “inactive” portions.
Each segment was timed for the band to return to a safe position as gravity resumed.
You can even see a couple of spots where a band member is out of position and is pulled into place or a frantic move is made.
Frankly, I wouldn’t care if it’s just the highlights of 8 takes spliced together, it’d be just as amazing and just as true to what is stated in the beginning of the video. That said, from their explanation, it does sound like the video was just one take, spliced together to remove the inactive parts. I don’t really understand why they needed to give themselves that extra challenge.
Part of the appeal (and amazement at) of their videos is that it’s all one take.
How amazing would the Rube Goldberg machine have been if they filmed small segments and spliced together the best?
Yeah, but for something like this, which is going to get spliced anyway (and to me that destroys the visual point of a single continuous take), I’m willing to give that continuous, unedited take some leeway. In this particular case, it’s just an amazing video that knowing it was all footage from a single take doesn’t particularly make a difference to me, but I can see how others might.
It would have looked worse if spliced from different flights. Don’t forget the balls(and other stuff) stays in place during each transition. But where the stuff winds up is random on each flight so splicing different clips would result in an instant change in placement in the finished video.
Actually, now that I think about it, continuity would be an issue and it’s easier just to get it as right as possible in one take.
No, I mean it looks like coremelt is now conceding that the band did actually go up in the freefall plane.
But he’s still insisting it’s all special effects.
Really can’t believe we’re still discussing this but…
It depends on how you want to define a ‘take’. Technology has progressed to the point were it isn’t so obvious any more. The fact that they edited out the ‘down’ time in between the zero-g time in my mind does not negate it still being one continuous take. If they had spliced together segments from *different *flights then that could not be considered one take. But they didn’t do that. And I see why, there is so much going on in each 27 second segment that if they tried to use completely different ‘sessions’ they would have had to crank up the CGI morphs in between to get them to match. And that *would *have negated the one ‘take’ aspect.
To me the fact that the performers did the final, released video all in one continuous flight, that they never had the crew come in and move anything or clean up anything, qualifies it as being a single ‘take’. Maybe with an asterisk mentioning the skipped bits, but it was still one ‘take’ for them (after much preparation & rehearsals & imperfect attempts).
Editing is not really considered a ‘special effect’. Everything that’s filmed is heavily edited for different angles, line readings etc. yet we don’t consider it ‘cheating’ or fooling the audience (even though in the strictest sense of the word it always is). When a character is talking and there’s a brief cutaway reaction shot of another actor we don’t consider that a ‘special effect’ or a cheat even though that shot was not done while the other actor was actually speaking (or even there).
Neither is the ‘fudged’ timing because it was done to make the song’s rhythm fit the confines of the zero-g timing, not because it made it easier (it simply would have been impossible otherwise). Changing the timing, in fact, made it look a little less perfect but couldn’t be helped. Every single film released on PAL videotape is sped up a tiny bit to convert it from 24fps to 25, but (almost) nobody notices or cares.
Everything they say at the beginning is true, and everything released about the making of it is true. There is no deception, and it was all done with practical, in-camera effects except for the short morphs between (always consecutive) zero-g segments, and I don’t consider that either a deceptive ‘special effect’ or a cheat. They should be highly praised for an absolutely amazing achievement.
Yeah, but the part where they claim that they did it using an alien anti-gravity ray is totally bogus, right? I can’t see how they can get away with claiming that.