Known for their innovative music videos and dance-worthy tracks, OK Go knows the power of great visuals. Coordination is often the name of the game, from the viral treadmills in “Here It Goes Again” to 64 synced and choreographed smartphones in “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill.” For their latest release, “Impulse Purchase,” the group turned to another means of collaboration: open-source animation.
OK Go teamed up with animators Lucas Zanotto (previously) and Will Anderson, along with Blender Studio, to create a digital music video unlike any they’ve made so far. The song “Impulse Purchase” takes Zanotto’s characteristic cartoonish characters, which roll and explode in a variety of playful, geometric shapes and combines the imagery with real-time motion captures of lead singer Damien Kulash’s face.
The video opens with a hint of the process behind the scenes, and the credits reveal even more insights into how the software captured the movements of all the band members.
Blender is an open-source software that enables dynamic 3D modeling and animation, instrumental in the recent Academy Award-winning film Flow. Zanotto and Anderson used a tool called Geometry Nodes, “a node-based way of creating complex geometry that can change dynamically, involve simulations, and ultimately drive a performance in an adaptive way,” Anderson told It’s Nice That. In the spirit of the application used to build it, the music video itself is open-source, allowing viewers to download the source files and tinker around with it.
Move around to more tunes on OK Go’s website and YouTube.
