Ok Go‘s penchant for elaborate music videos has gained world-wide notoriety by now, their past offerings having featured complicated treadmill choreography, musical obstacle courses and trained dogs. Set on outdoing themselves, the masters of one-take music videos are back with an illusion-filled visual feast for The Writing’s On The Wall.
The four-minute clip is set in a Brooklyn warehouse and is filled to the brim with a series of optical illusions which draw in the audience to see an image one way and then, sometimes literally, turn it on its head.
According to Rolling Stone, the clip took nearly three weeks to assemble and 50 takes to get right. The visual message aims to compliment the subject of the track which details those moments just before a relationship ends where two people see the same things in different ways.
During the clip, the words “I think I understand you, but I don’t” appear hidden within small wooden crates. As the message comes into view, the visual twists, as the camera rotates around in front of the words. “That’s where the song comes out emotionally,” frontman Damian Kulash told The Wall Street Journal. The meaning emerges in a small space in front of the camera, rather than in “this big open space we’ve been running around in.”
Watch the full clip as well as a behind the scenes snippet courtesy of Time, below. OK Go’s new album, Hungry Ghosts, is due in October.
Watch: OK Go – The Writing’s On the Wall
Watch: Behind The Scenes of Ok Go’s new video (via Time)
