Their last video memorably featured a Rube Goldberg machine that filled a two-floor warehouse and took four minutes to complete its sequence of wonder and mayhem. This time, the tech-happy band recruited Jeff Lieberman and Eric Gunther–artists, musicians, and all-around interesting guys–to direct the video.
Together, the team warped time. Check out the video, and read below for some details about the project from Lieberman.
From Lieberman:
“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”
“We also made a special friend in the process. Her name is Orange Bill and she’s a goose. You will agree that she clearly has a future in music videos.”
The Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan may seem the ultimate arbiter of contemporary art success, with space on its rotunda walls reserved for the world’s buzziest artists. But this October the museum will showcase 25 videos made not by famous or even up-and-coming artists. Instead, the museum is preparing to welcome the unknowns–from YouTube.
The museum and the video site are pairing up on a project they call YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. Participants can submit videos (one per person) created within the last two years, until the July 31 deadline.
As one might expect from a collaboration with a site that features both dancing birds and baby delivery how-tos, the competition has few entry restrictions. The hope, as described in a promotional video, is to tap the truly “new” and “to reach the widest possible audience, inviting each and every individual with access to the Internet to submit a video for consideration.”
You’ve probably seen a Rube Goldberg machine in a science museum sometime, and watched with amusement while balls rolled down tracks or balloons inflated, triggering other mechanical events in a complicated chain reaction. But we guarantee you’ve never seen a Rube Goldberg machine quite like this.
When the rock band OK Go, justly famous for its treadmill dancing video, decided to make a new music video for its song “This Too Shall Pass,” the rockers tapped the artsy engineers at Syyn Labs to do something really special. The result was this 4-minute Rube Goldberg machine that plays part of the song, synchronizes with the beat, and involves the band members getting very messy. It runs the length of a two-story warehouse, and the action was filmed in a single shot. With no further ado, we give you: The mother of all Rube Goldberg machines.
Update: Check out the newest OK Go video, which warps time in many amusing ways. It also features a charismatic goose.
Tonight, New York’s splendid Carnegie Hall will not only resound with beautiful music, it will glow with unearthly images.
A performance of the orchestral suite The Planets, by the English composer Gustav Holst, will be accompanied by a new video put together in cooperation with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and featuring the latest high-definition planetary images. The suite contains seven movements that correspond to seven planets: Earth isn’t included, and the disputed planet Pluto hadn’t been discovered when Holst finished the piece in 1916. As for the images, they come from missions like the Mars rover explorations, the Cassini-Huygens investigations of Saturn, Galileo’s trip to Jupiter, and the epic Voyager 1 and 2 treks across the solar system.
Maestro Hans Graf of the Houston Symphony explains the origins of The Planets: An HD Odyssey in this video:
Ironically, Holst was inspired not by the astronomical wonders seen through a telescope, but rather by the astrological clap-trap of horoscopes and star signs. Still, as long as we get to swoop over panoramas of Mars in high-definition, we’ll forgive the composer his quirks.
Now we know what students do for fun over at Stanford University. If this video is to be believed, they wave their iPhones around while wearing speakers strapped to their hands. (Actually, the whole production seems kind of like using a weirding module, so maybe they’re onto something.) The speakers amplify the different sounds produced by various iPhone apps to create a glorious symphony, courtesy of the MoPho (Mobile Phone) Orchestra.
Some of the music apps are quite fun–like the one called the “Ocarina” that transforms your iPhone into a 12,000-year-old wind instrument (but with more apps). Check out the video below for a demonstration of both ancient music and modern compositions played on the iPhone, from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
In preparation for the first-ever National Honey Bee Awareness Day that took place on Aug. 22, big bee backer Häagen-Dazs used the creative efforts of five brothers from Los Altos, Calif. to make a short video raising awareness.
Max Lanman, a 21-year-old senior at Yale majoring in film studies (and the third-oldest Lanman brother), directed, edited and photographed the result of the request, a viral video entitled “Do the Honey Bee.”
In the video, people dressed as bees shimmy and shake, mimicking the ways bees “dance” to communicate with each other. The lyrics extol bees’ agricultural importance, and the beat’s pretty catchy, too.
But don’t take our word for it—check out the video. You just may want to “shake your stinger, bend your knees / Get down real low, and do the honey bee.”
Move over all you Webcasters who stream your life on Justin.tv. Now, 36-year-old filmmaker Rob Spence claims to have a better way of filming his life — he wants to implant a wireless video camera in his eye socket, to record (and reveal to the whole world) everything he sees.
After a shotgun accident cost Spence an eye at age 13, he eventually had his eye surgically removed and replaced with a prosthetic one. And now he sees a way to exploit his loss of sight by essentially creating a video crew in his eye socket.
Of course, actually building an eye camera is quite a feat of engineering. It involves getting a tiny camera (8 square mm for an imaging sensor) into a prosthetic eye, then figuring out how to relay images with a wireless transmitter on a circuit board, and finally streaming the whole thing live on the Internet.
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
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Move over all you Webcasters who stream your life on 
