OK Go
For years, drones have been a hot topic for their controversial use in airstrikes during times of war. But last week, power-pop band OK Go proved drones could be used for a far less morbid task: filming music videos.
OK Go’s latest video for “I Won’t Let You Down” off their latest album, Hungry Ghosts, fulfills its titular promise with a music video that wows. The band members, along with more than 1,500 volunteers, ride Honda personal mobility devices and coordinate dancing with umbrellas in an unbelievable feat of mass choreography. The entire shot, timing in at five minutes and 20 seconds, was made possible only through drone filming technology.
At the beginning of the video it’s impossible to tell that a drone camera is doing the filming because the shot is held steady at a few feet off the ground.
Then, just after the one-minute mark, the camera flies into the air, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the band and dancers’ choreography. The video does this a couple more times, including a final aerial shot that ends nearly half a mile in the air with a pan over Tokyo, where the video was filmed.
Let’s briefly deconstruct the advantages the video’s director gained by using a drone instead of an expensive filming crane. The band utilized both outdoor and indoor spaces, and the camera moved backward through a narrow doorway, two techniques that would be difficult, if not impossible, with a large crane. Then the camera swivels in a couple of 360-degree spins that would reveal the base of a crane if it were being used. Last but not least, the half mile-high shot at the video’s end is totally out of any terrestrial machine’s range.
The beauty of these filming techniques is in the way the drone camera’s novelty neither overpowers nor succumbs to the rest of the video. The focus of the music video is on the synchronization of the dancers, not on the quirkiness of the camera. But the drone is not entirely lost either; it’s impossible to watch the video without wondering how they accomplished such ambitious camera angles.
OK Go’s video is not the first piece of film to employ a drone camera. Movies like Iron Man 3, Skyfall and The Hunger Games have all been cited as using drones for filming. But the drone shots are often brief and indistinguishable from the rest of the movie, losing the novelty inherent to the shot.
Other short-form videos have also successfully used drones for innovative scenes that play to the technology’s singular advantages: YouTube videos like “Superman with a GoPro” and “Fireworks filmed with a drone” illustrate creative uses for drone cameras’ unmatchable versatility. House duo Booka Shade’s music video for “Crossing Borders” uses a drone with seven cameras to create a trippy “little planet” effect. Other amateur videos feature tracking shots that fly through forests and over creeks and other terrain that would make a dolly shot impossible.
OK Go’s music video is another example of how the innovation of drone filming can be used to successfully complement a film’s subject matter. Though such novel use of the filming technique is so far largely constrained to YouTube, it surely won’t be long before more studios begin to use drones.
