OK Go built a music video from 64 phones playing one image across their screens

Directors Damian Kulash and Chris Buongiorno had to stage a single unified image out of dozens of independent moving feeds, choreographed to the track.

One composition made of 64 concurrently playing phone videos — separate screens that only form the picture together, mirroring the song’s clashing moods.

Roughly two months of full-time prep: hunting surprising moments in raw material, building a creative vocabulary and arc, rehearsing to the music; 64 phones each play a timed video, with hand choreography by Phillip Chbeeb.

Released 16 January 2025; won a Bronze at Clio Music 2026, the winner listing crediting OK Go & Park Pictures and framing the concept as contradictory pieces trying to coalesce into a whole.

A Stone Only Rolls Downhill, released on 16 January 2025, plays 64 individual videos concurrently on mobile phones so that together they form one unified composition. Each screen carries its own moving image; the picture exists only because the separate parts hold together — a format that mirrors the song’s uneasy pull between anxiety and hope, as the Clio Music 2026 entry framed it.

Director Damian Kulash described the method in a Project Management Institute interview published in April 2025: start from exploration, look for surprising moments in the raw material, develop a creative vocabulary, then build an arc and rehearse the moments against the music before filming. He and co-director Chris Buongiorno put roughly two months of full-time prep into the video. The credits read like an ensemble production — editor Justin Clare, hand choreographer Phillip Chbeeb with assistant choreographer Emilio Dosal, and hand dancers including Daniel Norwood and Franklin Yu.

The Clio Music 2026 winner listing credits OK Go & Park Pictures and awards the video a Bronze. OK Go Sandbox, the band’s education offshoot, documented the construction as 64 concurrent videos and turned it into a lesson on project management, visual art and the design process.

The video’s meaning — contradictory parts coalescing — demanded a format where the image literally fails if the parts do not align.

Phones served as both props and pixels: every screen a distinct feed, the mosaic visible only across all 64.

The band’s process starts with discovery, so two months of prep went into finding and rehearsing moments before a frame was filmed.

Precise timing let dozens of independent feeds read as one synchronized composition rather than a split screen done in post.

When the idea is many parts becoming one, make the format prove it: separate screens holding a single image carries the meaning by itself.

The Bronze at Clio Music 2026 put the video among the band’s award-recognised format experiments, alongside the one-take robot-mirror video ‘Love’. OK Go Sandbox repurposed the build as a teaching case on project management, visual art and design process for classrooms.