For anyone who's never tried: Building Rube Goldberg machines is insanely hard. The idea is to build a machine that looks as difficult and improbable as possible. Pieces that are destroyed or completely changed during the operation are par for the course. For each run, the entire machine needs to be reset manually. If one piece fails, you have to reset the whole thing.

The whole design process is basically fighting against yourself--how insane and ridiculous can I get and still have the thing work.

tl;dr We lost the Rube Goldberg machine contest and I'm still bitter.

That and the timing of the machines to the song amazes me the most.

I've built two, and both were completely trivial compared to this. One took me about a week, the other took me and two other people about a month. (In both cases, working an hour or two each day.)

I can't imagine the work that must have gone into this.

I grew up playing Mousetrap.

That was a sweet game. :)

Was it a game? I don't know anyone who actually played it, we just built the trap and set it off. :)

That's what made it so sweet. Fun had nothing to do with any rules of play.

Something else to note is that OK Go got its way with the label, and this video is embeddable.

For reference, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060736

Is that what happened? The plug for State Farm at the end makes me think they did an end-run around the label and got somebody else to pay for the video, thus the record company doesn't own the video and they can embed it? (But then they'd still own the rights to the song, so maybe not)

Maybe the label was alright with embedding if they could do a sponsorship deal to sub in for the otherwise lost revenue. (Recall that YouTube only pays the label for video views in a YouTube-hosted page.)

You may be right. I've been searching for some evidence of either case, but haven't found any yet. I had figured that the video being embeddable had meant that the label had listened to Damian's previous post.

Also must-see when discussing commercial Rube Goldberg devices: Honda's "Cog" commercial at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYabfifhEPE

(Interesting in part because of how trivial it is to translate to different language.)

I love that ad. It was part of the original "power of dreams" campaign (they are writing text books about that) and all those honda ads rocked.

The only sad thing is it isn't a true device; it was filmed in sections.

It has a single cut in it, because the entire thing wouldn't fit in their studio. Slightly disappointing, but entirely understandable.

If I could have a "dream job" just handed to me, it would be to work at Wieden + Kennedy.

Dear Lord. I can't even set up a few Dominoes without knocking them over accidentally. Imagine setting up some of the massive contraptions they did in this video. Accidental set-off could literally kill someone.

On the first couple views I thought it had a cut while they reset the room---then I noticed that when they do the coloured fluid opening the drape they're actually going down a shaft to a different floor, and you can definitely see everything set up if you look for it. I think this might have actually been all one take (there certainly are enough destroyed TVs in the background to make this plausible!)

Wow.

I'm pretty sure it was all one take - most of their videos are like that. It may have taken multiple tries to get everything right ('Here it goes again', their most popular video with the treadmills, took 17 attempts, but they captured it all in one take [source:Wikipedia]).

No word yet on how many attempts this took - hopefully they didn't drop too many pianos

This guy says there are multiple cuts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV23EVZ-nc4

it took honda 606 takes to do the "cog" advertisement.. hope they did it in less

Judging by the TV's in the film, they had 9 or 10 goes at it, and still had 4 more TV's to go.

The guys who made the Rube Goldberg machine are brilliant hackers based in LA: http://syynlabs.com/

OK Go and a bunch of Syyn Labs peeps will be at a party on Friday, March 5 at LACMA. It's a bit spendy ($160 for LACMA membership + "muse" status + ticket price, plus god-knows-what for parking and cash bar), but it looks awesome enough that I'm tempted to pull the trigger. Maybe I'll see you there. :-)

There's a "OK Go Video Release Party/Young Director's Night COMBO Ticket" option for $47 (tix + fees). https://tx1.lacma.org/default.asp (go to special events for 3/5)

Cool, thanks for the tip. I might make it!

Apart from the machine itself, I love the camera work. It seems that:

- it (most likely) had to be a person, not a simple arm with camera, to pass through tunnels, etc. (yet the movement is really soft)

- the person had to keep avoiding strings along the way, which I imagine was quite hard while keeping the view on current action

You can see the camera man's reflection in the silver ball about 2m28s into the video.

A Steadicam is how you get smooth movement while walking with a camera: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steadicam

Agreed; this really was what impressed me most. Pulling off a long shot like that is really quite challenging technically.

You should also see: Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go). Which is a 30-minute long Rube Goldberg machine, although filmed in several stitched takes. It's really interesting as well as it also includes chemical reacting stuff.

Here's a part of that movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrRC3pfLnE

What an interesting video.. plenty of fire.

Using a Rube Goldberg machine would make one heck of an interesting way to light the Olympic Cauldron wouldn't you think?

How the Rube Goldberg machine Was Built: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

Starting at 2:30 the music is timed perfectly with the banners. Certainly the machine's timing was not that precise. How they were able to keep it synced up? It's impressive that a machine that looks so rickety still works.

I imagine they slowed down and sped up the video's playback slightly to match with the song's beat.

there are several instances of things being synced up. while it is probably true that they sped up and slowed down the video to make it match better, they still had to put effort into creating elements that would sync up, which is neat.

I'd really like to build one of these that plays music by itself (the sound of the machine operating plays a recognizable tune). similar to this (self playing super mario world):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXmNjB4-JdE

this would be an order of magnitude more difficult than a regular RG machine in meatspace as the timing has to be precise.

Obviously not the same thing, but have you seen the installation of birds playing electric guitar?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Kz8Nxb-Bg

I had the same thought as you when I watched the video - have the machine produce the audio track entirely.

What does Synn labs DO? This is amazing. I don't think anything I've ever done could possibly be as hard as that shot.

I've never noticed a youtube video before that was offered in 1080p. Great picture and it loaded quickly too. Although there were a few hiccups in the video during quick pans.

Details about the video:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

The Making Of videos are great as well.

I agree. I believe that the people cheering at the end of the video is everyone that helped out from Mindshare/Synn Labs.

I love PeeWee Herman-esque machines, used to try and make them all the time out of Meccano when I was a kid :)

Laughed when I saw all the broken TVs against the wall too :D

the video is cool and all but does anyone like the music? seems to get lost to me... i guess it's really not about the music though. not one comment before mine even mentioned it...

again awesome video but it's going to be hard for them to keep topping themselves but now it's their MO

The bullseye was the kicker! Great video.

Hmm OK Go seems to have broken YouTube

yea. anyone know what intermittent

  Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

implies?

Wow - they knocked off YT?

That was awesome.