Cars can play instruments too -- at least they can if you're OK Go, driving a radically modified Chevy Sonic through the desert.
In the new music video for "Needing/Getting," OK Go drives through a musical obstacle course of sorts. Shot in a desert outside of Los Angeles, the video includes 288 guitars, 55 pianos and 1,157 homemade instruments. It also showcases a Chevy Sonic that's been specially altered to have retractable pneumatic arms to play the instruments on set. All the pianos had their lowest octaves tuned to the same note in order to play the right notes, regardless of where the arm hits the keys.
Even by OK Go's standard for offbeat, highly intricate music videos (the treadmill choreography of "Here It Goes Again," the Rube Goldberg-inspired "This Too Shall Pass," the Google Chrome-powered "All Is Not Lost"), putting together "Needing/Getting" was a hefty task, requiring more than four months of preparation and four days to shoot and record. Lead singer Damian Kulash even took stunt driving lessons in order to man the vehicle you see in the spot.
The video was sponsored by Chevrolet as a part of its "Let's Do This" campaign for the Chevy Sonic, and appeared in Chevy's Superbowl ad. The campaign features the Sonic performing outrageous stunts, like skydiving, doing an actual 360 and more. Chevy has also encouraged users to tape themselves completing slightly easier challenges, for the chance to win a Sonic. The challenges tend towards Internet-meme territory -- owling, cornering, queuing, horsemanning, are all among the list of bizarre feats.
Watch the video below: