OK Go singer totes cameras and more

ByABC News
October 24, 2011, 10:54 AM

— -- With over 135 million combined YouTube views for its innovative music videos, Los Angeles-based indie band OK Go is at the forefront of using technology to advance its art. It's partnered with State Farm Insurance, Samsung, Nintendo and Range Rover to help finance videos, and it worked with Google earlier this year to debut a video in the HTML 5 programming language.

Online, the band has worked social media to its advantage, with over 400,000 fans on Facebook and nearly 600,000 on Twitter.

We met with OK Go lead singer and guitarist Damian Kulash at his Los Angeles home to talk about his tech, which included a robust collection of cameras, a music studio in the garage, and a beloved, $1,700 low-tech Lego version of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon on his living room table.

On being at the forefront of cutting edge

"We're not particularly techie people by nature. I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out the next cool thing. It's just the world we live in now."

Camera of choice

The Olympus Pen E-P1, a mini-SLR, marketed as a step-up camera for point and shooters. "It's totally revolutionized my picture-taking because it's small and convenient. It has real optics. The pictures it takes are amazing."

Also shoots with a Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D

He uses the camera mostly "as a viewer" though. He has the Nintendo 3DS game console, which comes pre-loaded with OK Go's 3-D White Knuckles video, but "you can't put your own material on it." So instead, he loads 3-D content onto the camera to show off.

Road warrior tools

His MacBook Pro laptop is by his side, which he uses to work on music in Reason and Protools software, and for video it's Final Cut Pro Studio. "It means I have to put a lot of RAM into my laptop and keep getting bigger hard drives."

The video star turns director

"It's amazing how much film-making a band can be called upon to do, just in a normal course of existing these days," he says. "Every time we go to another country, there's a promoter who says, `Hey, we need to let kids know you're coming, so can you make a quick video to say `hi' to your fans in Thailand or Australia?"

For the homemade videos, he sets up the Pen camera on a tripod, uses the video function, and then imports the footage into his Apple laptop and edits it in Final Cut Pro.

The Falcon

The Lego version of the Star Wars ship has been painstakingly put together by Kulash, as an antidote to working on music when not touring. "I often want a rote project that I can do, like doing a puzzle. I don't want to pressure myself to be creative, so I make big Lego sets."

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