OK Go are back doing what OK Go do... this time with the help of robots.The video for Love - the second from the band's first album in more than ten years - is a real OK Go special: an incredibly complex, brilliantly choreographed performance delivering a momentous visual experience - this time with a kaleidoscope theme being central to proceedings. And of course, it's achieved in a single take.It may not be quite at the scale than some of their most outlandish productions, such as filming in zero gravity, but this has the full spirit and essential creativity of an OK Go video from back in the days of Here It Goes Again, with a great deal of outstanding technical input from their latter work. It is designed to dazzle, and it succeeds.From the start we realise that mirrors are going to play a big role in this one. And then we find that mirrors are moving in choreographed motion on robotic arms. Soon lead singer Damian Kulash is embarking on a series of costume changes, while performing, including a mirror suit. He and the band move through through a series of connected sequences that, in the grand setting of a 19th century Budapest train station, has the faint aura of a Busby Berkeley production in the golden age of Hollywood.The full involvement of the robots with the mirrors - and the way they create kaleidoscopic effects and play tricks on the viewer - can only be explained by watching the fascinating Making Of video. But as in all their previous videos, Kulash has played the primary role in the devising of the video, collaborating with an array of talents. And also, in this case, 25 robots. Conceived in partnership with creative agency SpecialGuest, produced by 1stAveMachine, with technology integration by SpecialGuestX, it's co-directed by Kulash, with Aaron Duffy and Miguel Espada. Other partners were project management experts PMI (who also worked on the previous video for A Stone Only Rolls Downhill), Universal Robots, Ray-Ban and Meta. The band wear the Meta-enhanced Ray-Ban glasses quipped with camera, audio and voice assistant functions, which created footage for the BTS video.“I still can’t believe we pulled off Love in a single take," says Miguel Espada, co-director and executive creative technologist at SpecialGuestX. "For me, this video is a statement of how creative storytelling and cutting-edge technology can work together. It wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration of humans and machines.” “This is the kind of branded partnership you dream of - a product that is uniquely suited to help push the creative in a way no other product could," says 1st AveMachine executive producer Andrew Geller. "We've poured so much into crafting something truly original, and seeing the behind-the-scenes through the band’s eyes as they navigate this wild run of visual sleight of hand makes it all the more special.” Finally, its worth pointing out something that may not be sufficiently recognised due to the fact he's also a musician: Damian Kulash is a genius-level creator in the artform of music videos. This video does not prove it - numerous other OK Go videos do that. It just reinforces it.Here's Damian, about the inspiration for the song Love that led to the video: “You know that dream where you’re somewhere familiar, maybe your childhood home, but there’s a door, one that was never there before, leading to some impossible magical place? Having children did that to my understanding of love. Suddenly, a huge new ballroom opened up off the little apartment I’ve inhabited so long - a whole new wing of love, grand and soaring and utterly overwhelming."It is endlessly amazing that we exist - little, conscious clusters of stardust occurring, apparently by chance, in the vast emptiness of the universe. And we get to experience love. It is unbelievable.”

Darri Thorsteinsson and Rufus Tiger Taylor co-direct a rip-roaring, all AI-generated video for Justin Hawkins' veteran pomp rockers The Darkness that goes way over the top - and then just keeps on going.Just as the band specialize in old-fashioned classic rock - sprinkled with self-knowing tongue-in-cheekery - the video for Rock And Roll Party Cowboy is an epic that plays like an an unearthed rock video from the days of big hair and even bigger budgets. It's as big and bombastic as the music. Actually even more so.3D artist Thorsteinsson (aka Darri 3D) and Taylor drop The Darkness (their AI-generated avatars, that is) in a club in neon-drenched Vegas venue, performing to a large crowd before the anti-hero biker star of the video arrives to kick off an ever-escalating riot of devastating mayhem. And then... the flying saucer arrives. Plus the band zoom off through the desert continuing to perform whilst on their motorbikes.It's ridiculous, it's hilarious and it's very Darkness. It's also remarkably well achieved (for a track that's over four minutes), drawing on a host of influences from 80s videos to big budget Hollywood blockbusters onwards. And it may certainly leave you with mixed feelings: awe at the quality of the product created via the latest AI technology; trepidation, even terror, that the capabilities of the tech are potentially as apocalyptic as the content of the video.But ultimately the video is so ludicrously entertaining that although you may not quite forget its AI, you may feel you can rest easy. This is not an Uncanny Valley type of video. It could basically be done in other forms of animation too - if you had all the time in the world.

Viagra Boys' Sebastian Murphy has a new girlfriend, and she's 3000 years old, in Eoin Glaister's video for Bog Body - a tour de force of comedy horror. Glaister essentially tells the story of the song, and as he happily admits, the subject matter plays to his particularly strengths as a director.In classic VB fashion, the track combines surly rock 'n roll power with a idiosyncratic lyric sung by Murphy - it involves a description of an ancient body being found perfectly preserved under ice in a bog, leading to his immediate adoration - and possessiveness. Eventually he insists that 'You're just jealous of her darkened skin and her dainty nose'.This quirky concept all the motivation that Glaister needs to bring a unique love story to the screen, which starts when the reanimated zombie-like Bog Body walks into a London boozer, and begins her ancient dance ritual - before Seb enters the pub whilst she's doing full splits on the pub carpet.And so their passionate affair begins, with the well-preserved ancient woman acquiring the taste for a rock 'n rolll lifestyle. What could possibly go wrong?“I love bog bodies," says Glaister. "I’m obsessed. Thank GOD someone finally wrote a song about one. Dream gig really, got to spend the day in the pub with my mates watching a Bog Lady dance to one of my favourite bands. Mammoth effort from an extraordinarily talented bunch. Up the Bog!”