This awesome 4-minute music video was actually shot in only 4 seconds

While major movie studios would often shoot for days only to include a tiny fraction of that footage in the final cut, American rock band OK GO has taken the exact opposite approach in their latest music video.

Instead of spending days on set, the Chicago-based quartet shot the entire footage for their new 4-minute music video in only 4.2 seconds.

The band dropped the music clip – fittingly titled ‘The One Moment’ – on Facebook yesterday and it has already accumulated over nine million views in total.

In case you’re wondering how the production crew managed to stretch 4.2 seconds into four minutes, here’s how OK GO explains it in their blog:

We used very precise digital triggers to set off several hundred events in extremely quick succession. The triggers were synchronized to high speed robotic arms which whipped the cameras along the path of the action. Though the routine was planned as a single event, currently no camera control systems exist which could move fast enough (or for many sections, change direction fast enough) to capture a movement this long and complex with a single camera, so the video you see connects seven camera movements.

To give you some more context: While the footage unfolds at different speeds throughout the entire clip, at times the video runs at a pace almost 200 times slower than reality. By comparison, the video’s ‘fastest’ moment runs around three times slower than the speed it was originally recorded at.

The intricate planning for the video involved a total of 318 inter-triggered events, including 54 colored salt bursts, 23 exploding paint buckets, 128 gold water balloons. To capture all of this, the production crew shot the footage simultaneously using seven separate cameras.

Check out the full clip in the video section above.