

OK Go's new music video, featuring an insane Rube Goldberg machine - mawhidby
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

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GavinB
For anyone who's never tried: Building Rube Goldberg machines is insanely
hard. The idea is to build a machine that looks as difficult and improbable as
possible. Pieces that are destroyed or completely changed during the operation
are par for the course. For each run, the entire machine needs to be reset
manually. If one piece fails, you have to reset the whole thing.

The whole design process is basically fighting against yourself--how insane
and ridiculous can I get and still have the thing work.

tl;dr We lost the Rube Goldberg machine contest and I'm still bitter.

~~~
jamesbritt
I grew up playing Mousetrap.

That was a sweet game. :)

~~~
macrael
Was it a game? I don't know anyone who actually played it, we just built the
trap and set it off. :)

~~~
jamesbritt
That's what made it so sweet. Fun had nothing to do with any rules of play.

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mawhidby
Something else to note is that OK Go got its way with the label, and this
video is embeddable.

For reference, see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060736>

~~~
seldo
Is that what happened? The plug for State Farm at the end makes me think they
did an end-run around the label and got somebody else to pay for the video,
thus the record company doesn't own the video and they can embed it? (But then
they'd still own the rights to the _song_ , so maybe not)

~~~
misuba
Maybe the label was alright with embedding if they could do a sponsorship deal
to sub in for the otherwise lost revenue. (Recall that YouTube only pays the
label for video views in a YouTube-hosted page.)

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boredguy8
Also must-see when discussing commercial Rube Goldberg devices: Honda's "Cog"
commercial at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYabfifhEPE>

(Interesting in part because of how trivial it is to translate to different
language.)

~~~
ErrantX
I love that ad. It was part of the original "power of dreams" campaign (they
are writing text books about that) and all those honda ads rocked.

The only sad thing is it isn't a true device; it was filmed in sections.

~~~
kd5bjo
It has a single cut in it, because the entire thing wouldn't fit in their
studio. Slightly disappointing, but entirely understandable.

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timmorgan
Dear Lord. I can't even set up a few Dominoes without knocking them over
accidentally. Imagine setting up some of the massive contraptions they did in
this video. Accidental set-off could literally kill someone.

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blahedo
On the first couple views I thought it had a cut while they reset the room---
then I noticed that when they do the coloured fluid opening the drape they're
actually going down a shaft to a different floor, and you can definitely see
everything set up if you look for it. I think this might have actually been
all one take (there certainly are enough destroyed TVs in the background to
make this plausible!)

Wow.

~~~
mawhidby
I'm pretty sure it was all one take - most of their videos are like that. It
may have taken multiple tries to get everything right ('Here it goes again',
their most popular video with the treadmills, took 17 attempts, but they
captured it all in one take [source:Wikipedia]).

No word yet on how many attempts this took - hopefully they didn't drop too
many pianos

~~~
danicgross
it took honda 606 takes to do the "cog" advertisement.. hope they did it in
less

~~~
g_ford
Judging by the TV's in the film, they had 9 or 10 goes at it, and still had 4
more TV's to go.

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dskhatri
The guys who made the Rube Goldberg machine are brilliant hackers based in LA:
<http://syynlabs.com/>

~~~
mhartl
OK Go and a bunch of Syyn Labs peeps will be at a party on Friday, March 5 at
LACMA. It's a bit spendy ($160 for LACMA membership + "muse" status + ticket
price, plus god-knows-what for parking and cash bar), but it looks awesome
enough that I'm tempted to pull the trigger. Maybe I'll see you there. :-)

~~~
lnguyen
There's a "OK Go Video Release Party/Young Director's Night COMBO Ticket"
option for $47 (tix + fees). <https://tx1.lacma.org/default.asp> (go to
special events for 3/5)

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viraptor
Apart from the machine itself, I love the camera work. It seems that:

\- it (most likely) had to be a person, not a simple arm with camera, to pass
through tunnels, etc. (yet the movement is really soft)

\- the person had to keep avoiding strings along the way, which I imagine was
quite hard while keeping the view on current action

~~~
amvp
You can see the camera man's reflection in the silver ball about 2m28s into
the video.

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ciroduran
You should also see: Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go). Which is a
30-minute long Rube Goldberg machine, although filmed in several stitched
takes. It's really interesting as well as it also includes chemical reacting
stuff.

Here's a part of that movie: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrRC3pfLnE>

~~~
froo
What an interesting video.. plenty of fire.

Using a Rube Goldberg machine would make one heck of an interesting way to
light the Olympic Cauldron wouldn't you think?

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browngeek
How the Rube Goldberg machine Was Built:
<http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/>

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oldgregg
Starting at 2:30 the music is timed perfectly with the banners. Certainly the
machine's timing was not that precise. How they were able to keep it synced
up? It's impressive that a machine that looks so rickety still works.

~~~
hakan
I imagine they slowed down and sped up the video's playback slightly to match
with the song's beat.

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nazgulnarsil
I'd really like to build one of these that plays music by itself (the sound of
the machine operating plays a recognizable tune). similar to this (self
playing super mario world):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXmNjB4-JdE>

this would be an order of magnitude more difficult than a regular RG machine
in meatspace as the timing has to be precise.

~~~
prawn
Obviously not the same thing, but have you seen the installation of birds
playing electric guitar?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Kz8Nxb-Bg>

I had the same thought as you when I watched the video - have the machine
produce the audio track entirely.

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joshu
What does Synn labs DO? This is amazing. I don't think anything I've ever done
could possibly be as hard as that shot.

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czstrong
I've never noticed a youtube video before that was offered in 1080p. Great
picture and it loaded quickly too. Although there were a few hiccups in the
video during quick pans.

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gry
Details about the video:

<http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/>

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pook
The Making Of videos are great as well.

~~~
mawhidby
I agree. I believe that the people cheering at the end of the video is
everyone that helped out from Mindshare/Synn Labs.

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Roridge
I love PeeWee Herman-esque machines, used to try and make them all the time
out of Meccano when I was a kid :)

Laughed when I saw all the broken TVs against the wall too :D

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floodfx
the video is cool and all but does anyone like the music? seems to get lost to
me... i guess it's really not about the music though. not one comment before
mine even mentioned it...

again awesome video but it's going to be hard for them to keep topping
themselves but now it's their MO

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kimfuh
The bullseye was the kicker! Great video.

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mikeryan
Hmm OK Go seems to have broken YouTube

~~~
tokipin
yea. anyone know what intermittent

    
    
      Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
    

implies?

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greenlblue
That was awesome.

