Chatting with…Adam from Syyn Labs

I know what you’re thinking.  What does a science lab have to do with music?  Well this particular laboratory was contracted by OK Go to create a Rube Goldberg machine for their most recent music video as this previous post indicated.  As soon as I saw that TED talk, I hopped on Adam Sadowsky’s site and ecstatically emailed him to inquire about getting an interview.  The guys at Syyn Labs are so smart and innovative that some of Adam’s team are, “guys who build stuff to go to Mars.”

However, before I go on, please watch the actual music video below (which has well over 14,000,000 views as of the date of this post), so it gives you a frame of reference for the conversation.

Our initial email Q&A

-Are you a music fan or were just interested in working with musicians on a project?

I’m a pretty big music fan – but, more importantly, I’ve been a huge fan of OK Go ever since seeing their video for “A Million Ways”.  I love their experimentation and sense of whimsy.  They’ve done more revolutionary work with a locked off camera than anyone I can think of.

-How did OK Go hear about you?  Had you heard of them before?  Were you initially excited about the project or did it take convincing on their part?

OK Go had this idea for a “machine that would dance with the band”, and they sent out an email to their friends asking for people to participate.  We happen to have had a friend in common and we got very excited about the possibilities.  We drafted a 18 page proposal (including pages of bios of our amazing team), and it pretty much blew them away.  Once we met, it was pretty clear that we wanted to work together.

-What prompted you guys to create the “10 commandments” of the machine?

The “10 commandments” didn’t come from on high like tablets to Moses.  They really came out of the requirements for the machine from a practical, aesthetic and “understandability” perspective.  They were developed over many hours of conversations internally and with the band.  They are the basic parameters for the building of the machine.  When we had our very first conversations, the whole range of interactions is possible.  But we knew that timing was critical.  We knew that reliability was important.  We knew we’d probably have to try a whole lotta times to get it right.  We knew it would have to read for camera.  Each of these successive things combined to bring the whole thing into focus.

We had thought about using all kinds of things like lasers, fog, chemicals, computers, fire, etc.  But we quickly realized that they’re hard to film, or if we had them, say, burn through a rope, that timing of the burn-through is unpredictable which is unacceptable in a machine that needs split second precision throughout.  Chemicals are messy, potentially dangerous and possibly expensive.  Impractical for a machine that we had to run 85 times just during shooting (not to mention all the times we had to practice before we shot!)!  And so on.

And thus the “commandments” were born.

-Did they give you complete creative freedom to design once defining the 10 commandments?

They were very involved from the start through to the moment the last paint flew.  And the machine is far better for their involvement.

-How long did you design for?  Did you improvise any of it?

We started working with the band on this project in September of ’09.  We had a bunch of internal meetings where we talked things through, experimented with some things, took a space in November (which required weeks worth of work cleaning, bringing in electricity, lighting, etc.)  Most of the big work began in December.  We shot on Feb 12th and 13th.

I don’t know if I know what you mean by “improvised”.  Most of the machine was, in a sense, improvised in that the parts aren’t being used as they were originally intended.  Glasses and spoons as a musical instrument?  Sledgehammers in a newton’s cradle?  There were certainly changes made at the very last minute – some that affected the performance of the machine, which required significant additional engineering to address.  So, in effect, the whole machine was improvised in one sense, but none of it was untested.

-What was your favorite part of the machine to design?  Most difficult part to design?

That’s like asking which are your favorite children…  Besides, this was a team effort throughout.  I’d hate to answer that question for all 55 extraordinary members of the team who all made contributions.

Designing something for a Rube Goldberg Machine is easier than building it, as we discovered.  The way you imagine the physics working in your head or on paper is often radically different than the reality.  I don’t know if I could point to a single most difficult piece.

-Was there a segment of the machine that kept not going as planned?  How did you go about trying to fix/tweak it?

We made a very last minute change to the piano.  It was originally designed to drop slowly to the ground, but it was decided the day before shooting that it was far more dramatic for it to come crashing down, possibly (awesomely!) breaking in the process.  That was all well and good, and in testing, when nothing else on the floor was set, it ran beautifully.  The trigger worked, and it knocked the next trigger perfectly.  However, once we had the chairs and the rattrap flags set during shoot day, the piano hitting the floor shook the floor so much that the chairs would fall and the rat traps would fire prematurely.  Since the rat traps were a 30 minute reset all by themselves, we lost at least an hour of shooting time correcting for that change – ultimately, putting a couch cushion under the rat trap flag mechanism sufficiently dampened the vibration.

-Do you think this project was a success? Why or why not?  If so, what parameters came to mind when determining that (ie the machine works?  youtube views?  youtube comments?)

The project was a spectacular success!  We created an amazing piece of video that, most importantly to my mind, fills the band, the team and me with delight.  We satisfied ourselves by building the very best RGM music video we possibly could, and we seem to have delighted a good many others.  What other measure is there?

-What was it like to speak at TED?  Did they contact you or vice versa?  Were you nervous?  Do you feel your talk was well received?

We’ve had the pleasure of a wonderful relationship with the folks at USC (Univ. or Southern California), who put on the very first co-sponsored, but independently organized TED event, TEDxUSC in 2009.  They asked me to speak in 2010 at their second event where Syyn Labs also had a number of exhibits on display.  I was fortunate in that the TED organization liked my talk and put it up on their website.  That is truly an honor.

-Are you interested in working with other musicians?  can you see yourself getting involved in things outside of music videos?

We’d love to work with anyone with a creative vision.  We’ve done consulting work for TV, shot a small RGM for a children’s TV network, we’re doing a pair of viral videos for a car battery no RGM’s, and we’re in discussion to build a huge (non-RGM), machine for another product.

Adam and I spoke on the phone while he was driving to “the middle of nowhere” California to shoot a car battery commercial that included one of his brilliant machines.  As soon as he picked up the phone, he had to make a turn and kept me on hold for a minute (which I respect because talking and making turns isn’t the smartest thing to do).

When we finally had chance to get into the nitty gritties, I jumped right in to ask him how the video has effected the type of people that reach out to him, to which he immediately replied, “you can’t really have that kind of highly visible online viral video and not have lots of attention as a result.  We’ve been very fortunate in that regard.”

When I asked Adam about  his experience working with the band, he said that they, “drove us to accomplish what we wouldn’t have reached for had we been up to our devices…they really wanted us to make art.”

I’d like to think that the video turned out to be the most visually engaging and entertaining pieces of music video “art” that I’ve seen since Nyle’s Let The Beat Build.  Also, Adam went on to mention that have 60 HOURS of HD footage including behind the scenes look at the planning and building as well as interviews and outtakes.  Adam alluded that they had thrown around the idea of condensing that footage into a documentary (which could quite possibly be the best music doc since Tom Dowd and the Language of Music), but there is nothing set in stone as of now.

One thing is for sure.  This won’t be the last machine that Adam will build.  If fact, given the sort of juicy details Adam privied me to, I’d say that this isn’t even the most interesting, whacky, or innovative one yet.  Stay tuned because big things are underway for Syyn Labs.

In addition to his work at Syyn Labs, Adam Sadowsky also runs the highly successful LA-based meetup group Mindshare.la.