This Is How You Make A Music Video Now

The band OK Go uses technology, ingenuity and mildly dangerous stunts to reinvent a dying genre. After 350 million views, they tell their secrets.

DAMIAN KULASH JR, lead singer of OK Go, likes to joke that his tombstone will read: “One of those treadmill guys.” He’s referring to the band’s 2006 breakout music video, in which the four members performed a synchronised dance on some gym equipment. If this were all Kulash is remembered for, it wouldn’t be a terrible thing: ‘Here It Goes Again’ has been viewed more than 37 million times. But we’ve got a better epitaph for the 41-year-old singer: The King of Viral Videos.

The band now puts out single-take stunt videos yearly, each with tens of millions of views. The members toss out ideas – “We should do something with dogs” – and what emerges are wild feats of engineering and imagination that often take months of planning to execute.

“To be honest, it’s a bad business model,” Kulash says. “The way to make money on YouTube is to make something extremely fast and sh*tty, and do it often. But this is a decent business model for a bunch of nerds who like making stuff.”

We wanted to get the story behind the band’s viral videos: what inspires them, how they’re planned, and what actually happens on set during filming. So we rented a studio in Los Angeles, queued up our favourite clips and watched live with Kulash. These are the stories he told us. – Mickey Rapkin

1 THIS TOO SHALL PASS (2010)

With 12 engineers and Kulash’s father, OK Go built a two-storey Rube Goldberg machine.

After six months of working on this thing, we’re down to the night before shooting starts. We’re in an abandoned warehouse and the lights go out. A drunk driver hit the transformer. So we started testing the machine in the parking lot. People need saws and drills, so we hooked up to car batteries.