The song is about..
...being in a moment and being present...
...grasping the moment that you're in...
...those few moments in life that really really change your life...
... there's a spirit or a heart to that song...
...and we wanted to try to capture that visually.
Normally when we take a film we're shooting still pictures many times per second.
ANDY: Like you can think of a flipbook, it's just a series of frames and it creates an animation and that's basically what video is.
DAMIAN: To help us understand slo-mo, I recorded myself jumping at 24 frames per second.
That means that the camera which is recording me is taking 24 photographs every second.
Those photographs, in film and video language, are called frames, so we'd say that this camera's frame rate is 24 frames per second.
Now you're watching this video playback at that same speed 24 frames per second
so all of my movements here they look normal because they're playing back at the same speed;
but if I record myself jumping at the frame rate of 240 frames per second
that means that the camera is taking ten times more pictures every second.
So when we play back those 240 pictures at the regular speed of 24 pictures per second
then one second of me jumping takes ten seconds of real time to playback.
For the One Moment video the camera we use can shoot up to 6,000 frames per second.
That's 250 times faster than normal cameras.
TIM: So the camera was in some ways the real star of this video.
DAMIAN: Slow motion starts to let you see into time frames that you are absolutely not familiar with.
It turns out that the difference between a bullet flying through the air and a water balloon popping are actually wildly different
they're just both super fast to us because our perception is pretty limited.
In the beginning of the video I start with a flipbook and I was told that I would have to perform a couple of different steps in a very fast shot.
I was gonna have to flip through this gigantic flip book while trying to show as many pages as possible in a fast amount of time,
and then the other thing was that I was gonna have to lip sync.
"That all of this will end So open your arms to me Open your arms to me"
TIM: I had to rehearse it a lot and the thing was is that we couldn't set off the paint and everything until we shot it
because it was just a lot of paint, it was gonna be a lot of cleanup,
so I would just have Damian basically scream into my ear as I tried to rehearse these things in the hopes that-
that would be enough to get me through the actual take and it basically did.
DAMIAN: How you feeling?
TIM: I feel good.
DAMIAN: Your shoes look great right now.
TIM: I know these are cool.
I was doing the second verse, spinning this flip book inside a box.
There's a water tank right next to me, that gets hit with a projectile right when the section starts and then right
on the other side of me there are all these glass balls that fall and break;
and I have to sing a line and my line was "so while the mud" and this one,
like a lot of the sections of this video we shot once because we filled the water tank
and we were about to do the shot and the water tank just broke on its own, and spilled 50 gallons of water on the set.
That reset took I think three hours.
DAN: My role in the one moment video was to hold this pipe that had a blade on the end.
The pipe itself was pulled by a motorized super-fast piston that would pull the pipe across 10 to 15 feet
and the blade on the end would slice through paint cans. The whole stunt lasts for a quarter of a second.
Obviously we're gonna end a video with us covered in paint.
TIM: At the end of the video we wanted most of us to be flying into frame, so one idea was to trampoline ourselves into frame.
Eventually we settled on we would use wires and we would get pulled into frame and so someone pulls a wire,
we're wearing like a harness that's attached to another wire and we get pulled up and over and we fly.
The dance we were trying to choreograph, all of these beautiful slow-motion things, it's all happening in a realm that we can't directly access.
The only way I can talk to those events is through math.
TIM: There was so much math involved in this video to make sure that things happened in time
and it's very cool to see how math can turn into something so beautiful and so creative.