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edBull.com: This video is probably your most ambitious yet in terms of making it, how did it come about? Trish Sie: Damian and I went to Cape Canaveral [in Florida] and flew on NASA's version of the "Vomit Comet" back in November of We were excited to have the zero-g experience, of course, but we also wanted to see if there was music video potential there. We were left pretty bummed out about the possibilities, to be honest. It felt so promising, and yet so insurmountable at the time. Damian Kulash: This video in particular — it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and when Space X and Virgin Galactic started coming into the public eye around 2007, 2008, I remember thinking, “Oh my God, people are going to be making art in space soon, and I wanna do that!” Then I met with people from [Russian airline] S7 at a media event at the Cannes Lions Festival in France, and that’s where the adventure began. Sie: When Damian told me that a Russian airline was dead serious about funding our dream video, I thought I was hallucinating. In fact, until we were on our way to Moscow — and maybe even long after that! — I still couldn't quite wrap my head around the fact that we were actually getting to make this thing.

What was the trickiest part of creating this? Sie: We wanted this video to be a complete choreography, rather than a montage of awesome things that can be done in zero-g. That was the first big hurdle. Kulash: Because what we didn’t want to do was a bunch of cool stuff and edit it together later. It’s very much not our style, like where’s the challenge? Suddenly you’re just doing something fun and documenting it rather than building something that we’re proud of. So this was a long held dream for you both then? Kulash: Definitely, especially because it seemed so unlikely, in terms of the logistics. Looked at from the lens of our other videos, all of those have been weeks or months of setup and rehearsal — that wasn’t an option here. To get three-and-a-half minutes of zero-g we’d need some time to practice up there. Once we had the airline on board and enough flight time, I worked with an agency for logistics, and it became clear that we could do this. Then Trish and I started brainstorming what we could actually do. Then we went there for a week and started playing and testing. What was the trickiest part of creating this?

And how did you get around this? Sie: First of all, we broke the song into chunks that could be fit into a single period of weightlessness, but we wanted the shape of the dance to emphasize the structure of the song, not fight it. Kulash: We also came up with a system for doing a single take over eight parabolas. In each flight you have 15 parabolas and in each parabola you have 20 seconds of double gravity, then 50 seconds of weightlessness and few minutes of setting it all up again. So to make it one take, we took eight of these in a row over minutes. Sie: We also we slowed our playback of the song down a bit (28.5 percent, to be exact) and performed each portion of the dance a little slower. This way, the 21 seconds of song fit neatly into the 27 seconds of weightlessness. The pilots — there are 10 OF THEM flying the plane at the same time, by the way — pull out of the parabola when the plane has enough downward speed and momentum in order to "scoop" itself up out of the downward acceleration. It's a complex mathematical equation that isn't to be f--ked with, believe me. And it seemed like this whole adventure was death-defying enough as it was. So altering the length of the parabolas was not an option.

That sounds pretty intense did anyone get motion sick? Kulash: To start with it was extremely nauseating, the band were on pretty heavy anti- nausea drugs — none of us actually puked, though. Of course, given roughly people on the plane and over the course of the 20 flights we did, we think there were 58 times that people puked. So it was averaging two to three per flight. Looking to the song, was this written specially for this piece or did you instinctively know which track would work once this came about? Kulash: We never write our songs thinking of a video idea first. The things we write songs about and are most exciting to us visually often do line up. It's so unlikely we’d ever get to do this, that when the opportunity did come up it was amazing we had a song that was so relevant, like it actually is about discombobulation and gravity being subjective, which is perfect.