LOS ANGELES – “Action!” yells the director of OK Go’s music video of “The One Moment.” A choreographed sequence shot in the timespan of 4.2 seconds, the video is slowed down to minute detail so images of exploding paint match the beats of the music, ending in an explosion of floating guitars.

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Since the band OK Go’s music video for "Here It Goes Again," which was shot on treadmills, went viral, the band's videos have gotten increasingly more complicated.

They’ve created a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine and danced weightless in an anti-gravity plane. Even more difficult, the videos are usually shot in one take. 

“We are known for our one-take videos," said Damian Kulash, OK Go guitarist and singer. “The reason they’re usually one take is because we’re much more interested when people actually feel what’s happening in the video than the filmmaking of it.” 

Though rocking out is their first passion, it's their filmmaking along with their music that’s captured hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. Their videos are endlessly fun to watch, but there’s a method to their madness and their process is to be precise, which is critical if the goal is to perform one of your songs by banging instruments with a car.

“When our videos get done, people think that we’ve had this like super incredible idea,” said Kulash. “And really, it’s usually a pretty simple idea that we just didn’t give up on. And so we just go, 'How would you do that?' And break that down and break that down and break that down and in the end, you wind up with like a spreadsheet that is all these really simple little things. Like this is all really simple math. It just adds up to something really complicated.” 

“Sometimes the fun is in not knowing at first and then figuring it out,” adds Tim Norwind, OK Go bass guitarist.

The process of figuring it out has found OK Go a whole legion of unexpected fans: teachers who use their videos to instruct students about math, science, and physics. Because their videos are fun to watch, it’s easier for students to get excited about learning. 

“Nailed it,” jokes Kulash, after an impromptu jam session with Nordwind during a work break.

“The cool thing about our live show is that it’s for everyone,” said Nordwind. “It’s super family friendly. We’ve got kids from the age of four all the way up to like grandparents the age of 80. And one of my favorite parts of the show is in between the videos, we are taking questions from the audience.”

“And I always look forward to that and actually the kids are the ones that have the most inventive and imaginative questions,” said Nordwind.

Which is where they’re taking their latest inspiration: to the kids.

“It looks so simple,” demonstrates Norwind during one of their educational videos. 

They started a new learning tool called "OK Go Sandbox," an online educational resource available to teachers and students.

“A simple machine is the term that engineers and scientists give to these six objects,” explains Kulash in one of their videos.

It’s something that came up after countless conversations that came from teachers reaching out to them asking questions about how their videos get made, scientifically. 

“It’s rare that something you put out in the world actually goes out and does noble work that you didn’t intend for it to do,” explains Kulash. “So when our videos, ‘Oh, by the way, I just taught a bunch of physics to some 12-year-olds,’ you’re like, 'What?' And that’s the sort of thing you really want to get behind. 

“That’s pretty cool!” agrees Nordwind.

Because learning is cool.

For information and tickets for OK Go's upcoming Live Video Tour: click here