A series of digital triggers set off several hundred events in the video for OK Go's The One Moment, which was filmed in just four seconds.
The video for the band's new track was directed by lead singer Damian Kulash, who wanted to create a literal visual representation of the song's title.
"The song is a celebration of those moments in life when we are most alive," he said. "Humans are not equipped to understand our own temporariness; it will never stop being deeply beautiful, deeply confusing, and deeply sad that our lives and our world are so fleeting."
"For the video, we tried to represent this idea literally — we shot it in a single moment. We constructed a moment of total chaos and confusion, and then unravelled that moment."
This moment of "total chaos" involved hundreds of small events each set off by a series of precise digital triggers in quick succession.
Each trigger was synchronised to a robotic arm, which pulled the cameras along the path of the action.
"Though the routine was planned as a single event, currently no camera control systems exist which could move fast enough to capture a movement this long and complex with a single camera, so the video you see connects seven camera movements," said Kulash.
The video begins with the actual 4.2 second-long clip, before it is slowed down to accompany the music.
The 318 events that take place throughout the video include 54 bursts of coloured salt, 23 exploding paint buckets and 128 gold water balloons.
At one point, a group of guitars – which were deemed unusable by manufacturer Fender – are blown up into small pieces.
"It is not all one speed, but each section is at a constant rate, meaning that time does not accelerate or decelerate," said the director. "We just toggle from one speed to another."
"When the guitars explode, we are 200 times slower than reality. The watermelons are around 150 times, and the spray paint cans are a little over 60 times."
OK Go has developed a reputation for its creative and unusual music videos. They previously performed in zero-gravity for their Upside Down & Inside Out track and used optical illusions and visual trickery for their Writings On the Wall video.