Making Iconic Music Videos: How OK Go Fuses Creativity and Execution
Want to make music videos that stand out? Discover how OK Go blends creativity with project management skills to push boundaries in this Q&A with Damian Kulash.
Written by Deborah Walker • 22 January 2025
Projects aren’t confined to corporate offices, construction zones, or science labs—they’re everywhere. As project professionals, we understand the magic of transforming ambitious ideas into reality. It’s a skillset that transcends industries, even finding its way into the realm of music videos, where creativity meets logistical precision.
Few embody this intersection better than OK Go, the band renowned for their jaw-dropping music videos that push creative boundaries. From dancing treadmills to mesmerizing Rube Goldberg machines, OK Go’s videos exemplify how a bold vision, meticulous planning, and flawless execution come together to produce something extraordinary.
We spoke with Damian Kulash, OK Go’s lead singer and co-director of their latest video for "A Stone Only Rolls Downhill." In this candid conversation, Damian reflects on balancing creativity with practicality, how project management skills fuel their ambitious productions, and what it takes to bring seemingly impossible concepts to life.
This conversation is part of PMI’s broader exploration of creativity, production, and the value of project management in every field. If you’re a professional in advertising, marketing, or the arts—or just someone with a big idea waiting to be realized—you’ll find inspiration and insight in Damian’s unique perspective.
How do you approach making a new music video?
Once we have a basic “thing” we know we’re gonna work with — that thing could be optical illusions, dogs, treadmills, or Rube Goldberg Machines — we try to break it into three phases:
- Develop “the vocabulary.” This is basically just open-mode play. Get in a situation where we can play with “the thing” and be surprised by it. We spend a week with a couple dog trainers and their dogs and try to find 15 or 20 moments that have some kind of innate wonder or joy in them.
- Build the arc. Once we have that vocabulary, we try to figure out how the moments can be sequenced with the music to create a crescendo of surprises — basically it’s arranging and rehearsing. The key difference is that we’re no longer in the blue-sky mode where we’re trying to stay open to discoveries. Now we know what our building blocks are and we’re trying to connect them.
- Execute. We film it.
We put as much of our resources as we can into the first of those three phases, and that’s what tends to differentiate what we make. Complex projects — especially film projects, which tend to be made in a world of modular teams working together in ad-hoc, temporary arrangements — are usually the reverse of this.
It’s more efficient to do a ton of planning in advance, so that your budget can all be focused on the expensive part with the big crew and all of the fancy equipment, so phases 1 and 2 tend to be done all in the head of one person, or maybe a small team. But then you’re limited to the ideas that someone can have in the abstract, and in short, we don’t trust our abstract ideas enough for that. We know we won’t come up with anything different than other people would unless we actually put ourselves in situations that other people aren’t in. So, we “waste” our time and resources putting ourselves in those situations.

Our music videos are big undertakings — logistical rats’ nests of moving parts, timelines, and people. We’re lucky to have amazing producers and collaborators to help us wind our way through the maze, and project management is unquestionably an invaluable part of the process. Anyone can have crazy ideas, but very few people can figure out how to make them happen. If imagination and play are the heart of creativity, project management is the entire rest of the circulatory system — without it, the heart is useless.
Damian Kulash, OK Go
How do you balance creativity with practicality when brainstorming ideas that may seem impossible to execute?
This is always the struggle, isn’t it? One thing we find helpful is to clearly acknowledge to ourselves that uncertainty is uncomfortable, but useful.
The longer we can tolerate not knowing which fork in the road we’ll take, the more possible futures we can unlock. The trade-off is obvious when it comes to execution decisions: it takes lots of extra work to game out all the variables for three filming locations, rather than just committing to one early, but you’ll have more flexibility to accommodate everything else that hasn’t been decided yet.
The same dynamic is at work when we’re brainstorming — when you’re just imagining something in the abstract — even if the parameters are less clearly defined. The blank canvas is so daunting and amorphous that it’s really tempting to try to “build a base to work from,” by committing to the parts of our idea that are least in question. You start filling in the hazy imaginary version with specific shapes, colors and sounds, and all your downstream decisions start reflecting them.
It’s really taxing to try to hold onto an idea — to iterate and grow the idea — without letting our assumptions about the details get baked in. But if we can, it gives you incredible flexibility down the road to make the idea better AND more practical.

Really ambitious projects all boil down to the same human urge — that speculative, audacious ball of wonder and curiosity that makes us want to go find the edge of what’s possible.
Damian Kulash, OK Go
Who are the unsung heroes of your videos?
The unsung heroes of our videos are the producers. Well, hopefully they don’t feel unsung or unappreciated, but they’re definitely the heroes. Our whole method basically kicks the practical questions down the timeline as far as we can, to allow for us to keep exploring and discovering and revising, and every good producer understands the value of this, but it still shifts a ton of extra weight onto their shoulders... “I got your email, and I’ll answer as soon as I can. But in the meantime, can you spec this out in all three locations, and also let the costumer know she should be ready with both the black and the white options to contrast with the backdrop we haven’t decided on yet?”
It’s a little like “we’re gonna put a person on the moon, so here are 3 different spaceships we want you to spec out for landing on three different moons.”
Does each new idea get harder or easier to come up with?
Both, but on balance, probably harder.
We’ve gotten a lot of experience with recognizing good ideas in the wild. That magical feeling of wonder which just makes you want to chase an idea down its many rabbit holes — we’ve developed a very accurate spidey-sense about that feeling and can extrapolate a lot about whether an idea will keep us (and the viewer) interested for the length of a full song. In that sense, it’s gotten easier.
But there’s a natural mission creep to all of this. We’re never excited about returning to the place we already were, so we’re always pushing our limits. And that means the bar keeps getting harder to get over.
Those two forces roughly equal each other out. Our appetite gets bigger and harder, but we get better at doing it.
How much prep work went into this video?
It was roughly two months of full-time prep work for me and my co-director Chris Buongiorno. We had an editor (the amazing Justin Clare) and two of my bandmates working for about a month of that, also.
The OK Go Project
Learn how OK Go makes music videos that push creative boundaries by using project management skills in this Q&A with lead singer Damian Kulash.
Are you more creative or more organized? Which one is more important to making these videos successful?
If I had to answer one or the other, I am more creative than organized. But I think the key to most creative work, and for that matter probably most work of any kind, is to understand that ideas and projects shift through different phases and modes where wildly different types of skills are needed.
John Cleese makes a famous distinction between the “open” mode, where everything is play and discovery and making surprise connections, and the “closed” mode, where you are implementing and executing. You can’t let the closed-mode version of yourself be anywhere near the steering wheel — preferably not even in the car — when you’re initially at play, but eventually you need to pull over and invite him in to take the wheel.
It’s always useful to have the open-mode version of yourself ride along in the back seat at that point, ready to grab the reins if circumstances call for it. But you gotta teach him not to be a backseat driver.

John Cleese makes a famous distinction between the “open” mode, where everything is play and discovery and making surprise connections, and the “closed” mode, where you are implementing and executing. You can’t let the closed-mode version of yourself be anywhere near the steering wheel — preferably not even in the car — when you’re initially at play, but eventually you need to pull over and invite him in to take the wheel.
Damian Kulash, OK Go
Sometimes getting even a simple project done feels like a moon-shot. What do you think the similarities are between your music videos and getting humanity to the moon?
The moon landing was the greatest art project of all time! Or at least, the distinctions we make between different kinds of pursuits are meaningless at those extremes. Really ambitious projects all boil down to the same human urge — that speculative, audacious ball of wonder and curiosity that makes us want to go find the edge of what’s possible.
No matter how specialized or technical the steps along the way are, the fundamental project of NASA is a lot like that of and Michelangelo — and for that matter the church that paid for Michelangelo’s work — to do, or touch, or meet the impossible; to test the boundary of what’s possible.
Our videos, of course, are just the tiniest little instantiation of that — we’re not operating anywhere near the scale of NASA or the Vatican. But in our much humbler domain, it’s the same essential impulse — we’re trying to find where the edge of possible is and seeing if we can stick our finger over the line for a minute.
If someone told you they want to work on big, exciting creative projects like this, what skills would you say they need to succeed? Where should they start?
Creating a music video at this level is a massive undertaking of moving parts, timelines, and people. We had amazing partners to bring our vision to life, but we’re still hands-on with a lot of the video’s project management—we just didn’t think to call it that. Project management isn’t just a corporate job—it’s everywhere, even in creative endeavors like music videos. Looking back, we would’ve loved to have a dedicated project manager so we could focus more on the creative vision.
Band photo credit: Piper Ferguson
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