February 12, 2016
OK Go video of the day: "I Won't Let You Down."
After yesterday's post — embedding OK Go's "Upside Down & Inside Out" — my son John emailed me links to 2 other OK Go videos, the first of which is to the one you see above, which is immensely entertaining. Keep watching, as different things happen, and if you're emotionally like me, you'll be exclaiming in amazement at various points and profoundly moved by the beauty of the ending. And if you're as old as I am, you might, at a certain point, say aloud, as I did: "June Taylor Dancers!" And if you indulged in MTV in the 1980s, as I did, the audio might take you back to Scritti Politti:
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14 comments:
It's high school marching band practice all over again.
Trombones in the front.
Whoever thought this up has looked at a lot of drum corps (you know, DCI, the Scouts, that stuff), I bet. That's what came to mind when the shots started going all Busby Berkeley.
Very entertaining visually, not very compelling musically which is a shame, considering the high level of art they achieve with the visual presentation here.
btw, I always look directly at "stop degrading yourself" before I compose my comments.
Trivia: Gleason married June Taylor's sister.
Not exactly Dylan.
Cornhusker marching band ("The Pride of All Nebraska") is better. I like a big horn section.
Reminded me of these Umbrellas. Also a Japan-USA project.
The "making of" story of "I Won't Let You Down" is well worth a read. Filmed by drone. Directed by Morihiro Harano. For example:
To coordinate everyone moving in synchrony to the parking lot for the final setup, Harano set up enormous speakers and played "I Won't Let You Down" at half-speed, which "allowed for more precise movements even with the complicated choreography," he says.
Video- Gary Jules: Mad World
Hope everybody who wants to do something cool like that gets it done ASAP before the FAA lards any more regulations on 'commercial' use of camera drones (in the present age anything commercial is, of course, automatically suspicious).
"And if you're as old as I am, you might, at a certain point, say aloud, as I did: "June Taylor Dancers!" "
As it happens, I am. But my first thought was that I had never seen a Buzby Berkeley routine set in a parking lot. The overhead shots are pure '30s cinematography. And my second was that this was an echo of the opening ceremony of the 2008 games in Beijing.
That was the OK Go video I was thinking about after you posted that masterpiece yesterday.
There's another Rube Goldberg, all-in-one-take (almost) video out there too. "This Too Shall Pass":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
(As I read it, the video is edited, but the machine did complete all the way through three times. It took 60 takes to get three full runs through. Rube Goldberg machines are hard! The edit, as I understand it, is the first half of one successful run and the second half of another successful run, mainly because it looked nicer that way.)
In a few years (if not sooner) that video will be lambasted as misogynistic (women as props) and guilty of cultural appropriation. The otherwise liberal OK Go members will be forced to renounce the video and will consider the criticism a learning experience. Ah, leftism...
OK Go is smart. They've realized clicks pay more than itunes. Their viral videos support their music, not the other way around.
Easy to figure out how they did it, since the key coordinates were marked with highly visible tape. Also looked like they played with the frame rate, so in real time some of the more complicated sequences may have been happening much slower than presented.
Their Rube Goldberg video is my favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
I liked watching Beyonce's Formation much better.
/sarc
That video was very entertaining. They have come a long way from walking on treadmills.
As a couple of other commenters have already pointed out, the choreography in this video really derives from Busby Berkley, rather than the June Taylor Dancers, who (whom?) I also remember. I grew up watching morning Dialing for Dollars movies during summer vacation from school, which, at the time, played the back catalogue of old Hollywood movies, and I came to love the Busby Berkley musicals, (and Astaire and Rogers, along with W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, and Cagney and Bogart, etc., etc.).
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