“I have this spreadsheet that is massive that I was working on for a month, and sometimes I would look at it and it would not be numbers anymore, it was just squiggles. There were times that my brain just cracked.”

That comes across as a quote from a mathematician working on a new idea, or perhaps an accountant during tax season, but actually, it’s Damian Kulash (via Mashable), frontman of OK Go, talking about his band’s latest music video he directed, for the song “The One Moment.”

The song itself runs a pretty standard length, about four minutes or so, but the events depicted in the clip take significantly shorter: 4.2 seconds, to be exact, but Kulash carefully planned out the sequence of events so that when slowed down, things would progress and happen in the order he wanted. And there was a lot he had to coordinate: The video features a wall of exploding colored powder, flipbook animations of him singing, exploding paint cans, exploding powder balls… a lot of colorful explosions, really.

“We’re always trying something that is just on the edge of possible,” Kulash said. “If the line of what’s possible is just this hairline thing, we’re just trying to inch over it just for like, three minutes and then we come back.”

The video is currently available exclusively on the band’s Facebook page, so watch it above or here, and revisit our conversation with Kulash, during which he talks about the importance of the relationship between music and visuals.

Featured image: OK Go