This New OK Go Video is So Sharp You’ll Get a Paper Cut

One band, 567 printers and a lot of paper… the OK Go promo for their new single Obsession is another exercise in crazy in-camera creativity. This time round, the band performs in front of a huge bank of wall-mounted printers that spew forth coloured paper to create a cleverly choreographed back drop. 

The video was directed by OK Go’s Damian Kulash, alongside Yusuke Tanaka. The Japanese creative agency who helped devise the concept was Hakuhodo’s ‘next-gen’ agency SIX, and the brand agency was SPA-HAKUHODO. It was produced by AOI Pro.

The canny band are never one to miss a trick when it comes to paying for their elaborate music video – their award-winning ‘I Won’t Let You Down’ promo saw the band and a cast of hundreds ride Honda ‘UNI-CUB’ unicycles. This time round, the band has hooked up with Thai-based paper brand Double A Global.

And if you’re concerned about the insane volumes of paper used in the promo, don’t worry, the team have thought of everything; the video is preceded by an assurance that ‘by the time you see this, all of the paper will have been recycled, and the proceeds given to Greenpeace’.

[Before watching the video, though, be careful as the band has left the following message under the YouTube video: “This video has a lot of flashing colours. If you're susceptible to seizures, be careful, please. Your viewing experience will look significantly better if you manually set your YouTube resolution settings to 1440p or 2160p (for desktop, click the gear icon in the lower right). Just leaving it on “Auto HD” results in some pretty intense distortion during a few sections, because when the the colours and patterns get crazy, there’s actually just too much information flying by for YouTube’s normal HD compression. We broke the matrix. The good people of YouTube have been working with us to solve this (it’s a bit rate limitation issue) over the last 24 hours, but there’s no quick fix, and now it’s Thanksgiving in the US, and we’re all with our families.”]