A thousand takes, eight days, 64 phones, one impossibly complex music video. Yes, OK Go is back and in fine form with a music video for the track “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” directed by OK Go’s Damian Kulash and Chris Buongiorno.

Damian Kulash: “It’s a tough time to be optimistic. Trying to balance the anxiety (which is just realism) with hope (which is just necessary) can often feel like living in a split screen, and that’s what inspired the video. It’s the most human, DIY version of a split screen that we could come up with.

“Instead of using digital wizardry to glue multiple videos together, we shot one video for each of several dozen phones and laid them out, side-by-side, as a mosaic of screens. A single image emerges from all these separate pieces working sometimes in harmony and sometimes in discord – the many contradictory parts of ourselves fighting to coalesce as a single whole.”

Watch the BTS video:
 

 
 

 
Production: Park Pictures
Director: Damian Kulash, Chris Buongiorno
EP: Jackie Kelman Bisbee, Caroline Kousidonis, Michaela McKee
Head of Production: Chelsea Schwiering
Line Producer: Omer Dagan
Editor: Justin Clare
Hand Choreographer: Phillip Chbeeb
Assistant Choreographer/Dancer: Emilio Dosal
Hand Dancer: Daniel Norwood, Franklin Yu, Mikhail Metelkov, Phonix Banuelos
Production Designer/Assistant Director: T. Hunter McCann
Art Director: Benjamin Voutour
Gaffer: Gustavo Perez-Santos, Bryan Kaing
Key Grip: Gino Nix
Grip: William Tricarico, Ben Sex, Justin Kaid, Clint Klang, Shai Keston-Nix
Hair and Makeup: Heather Coleman
Production Coordinator: Felicia Tomiyasu-Gravante
Production Assistant: Monica Sanchez
Set Construction: Depict Inc.
Technical Camera Researcher: Jessica Schaefer
Additional Brainstorming: Timothy Legasse