OK Go’s latest music video, "Upside Down & Inside Out," is leaving more than a few heads spinning. The American pop-rock band shot the three-minute long video aboard an airplane flying over Russia at zero gravity.
The video was posted to Facebook on Thursday and quickly went viral, garnering more than 5 million views in a matter of hours.
"What you are about to see is real," the intro text explains. "We shot this in zero gravity, in an actual plane, in the sky. There are no wires or green screen."
Then the aerial acrobatics begin as band members toss laptops into the air. Joined by two S7 Airlines flight attendants (who also happen to be trained aerialist acrobats), they float, flip, spin, somersault and splatter paint all about the cabin in a colorful and carefully choreographed floating ballet.
The music video, touted as the first to be filmed in zero gravity, was shot in a single take as the pilot flew several parabolic maneuvers to provide brief periods of weightlessness.
"Because we wanted the video to be a single, uninterrupted routine, we shot continuously over the course of 8 consecutive weightless periods, which took about 45 minutes, total," the band explained on its FAQ page. "We paused our actions, and the music, during the non-weightless periods, and then cut out these sections and smoothed over each transition with a morph."
Band members spent three weeks training at ROSCOSMOS, Russia’s equivalent of NASA, in preparation for the zero-G filming.
Frontman Damian Kulash said the band loaded up on anti-nausea drugs for the in-air shoot, and none of them puked. The same, though, couldn’t be said for the video crew.
"Of course, given roughly 25-30 people on the plane and over the course of the 20 flights we did, we think there were 58 times that people puked. So it was averaging two to three per flight,” Kulsash told redbull.com.
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As for their next creative endeavor?
"I’d love to make a video in space! It’s not top secret, if you know anyone who has a spacecraft they’ll let us borrow definitely give me a holler," Kulash said.