The second music video for "This Too Shall Pass" was co-directed by Damian Kulash and James Frost. Similar to the band's video for "Here It Goes Again", the "This Too Shall Pass" video features a four-minute, apparent one shot sequence of the song being played in time to the actions of a giant Rube Goldberg machine built in a two-story warehouse from over 700 household objects, traversing an estimated half-mile course. As the song and machine operate, the members of the band are seen singing alongside the machine, with the members being shot at by paint guns at the song's finale. Parts of the machine are synchronized in time with the music; in one instance, glasses of water are used to repeat part of the song's melody in the fashion of a glass harp. One part of the machine shows the "Here It Goes Again" video on a television before it is smashed by the machine. The MAKE magazine 1993 Ford Escort racecar, used for the 24 Hours of LeMons, appears in the video along with a miniature LEGO version of the car. Alongside the LEGO car, several LEGO mini-figurines are displayed as a reference to the marching band video.
The floor plan for the Rube Goldberg machine used in the video covered two floors of a warehouse and had several distinct stations that worked in time with the music. The video's inspiration was from the band, who wanted "a giant machine that we dance with", a long-term aspiration of the band and inspired by other Rube Goldberg machines shown in videos on YouTube, including the interstitials used on the Japanese children's show PythagoraSwitch. While they considered the idea of the machine for each song on Of the Colour, they opted to use "This Too Shall Pass" to make the end result "majestic and epic", even though it already duplicated the previous marching band video. They sought help through online science message boards, eventually coming in contact with Syyn Labs. From a pool of talent at a Syyn Labs-hosted "Mindshare LA" gathering, about 55 to 60 people from Syyn Labs, the California Institute of Technology (including some who work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and participated in the Mars Exploration Rover program, hence the model rover seen in the video) and MIT Media Lab helped to design and construct the machine. Damian Kulash's father (Damian Kulash Sr.) also participated in the machine's construction.
The team had to work on a limited budget, using recycled trash for many of the props in the device; after filming, the total estimated cost was approximately $90,000. The team avoided the use of "magic" — automated devices like computers or motors — and instead focused on purely physical devices. The total time to create the video from conceptualization was about six months, with two months of planning and four months for design and filming. The warehouse where filming took place was in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, and was secured by Syyn Labs in November 2009. The final construction within the warehouse took over a month and a half during January and February 2010. The band members helped in the last two weeks of construction, having spent the previous four months on tour.
Once the machine was completed, the filming, using a single Steadicam, took two days to complete on February 11 and 12, with an estimated 60 takes for the machine to properly function. The first day of filming included 47 takes, none of which successfully completed the entire machine and necessitated a second day of filming. Many of the takes ended only 30 seconds into the process, at the start of the song's chorus, where a tire would fail to roll properly into the next section of the machine. Syyn Labs had a group of 30 people to help reset the machine after each failed take, a process that took upwards of an hour depending on how far the machine ran. There were no significant injuries during filming; Tim Nordwind once was hit hard with paint at the end, while the Steadicam operator nearly got hit with one of the barrels at the end of the mechanism in the shot used for the final video. His reaction may be seen in the released version of the video. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Too_Shall_Pass_(OK_Go_song)#cite_note-wired_video-8
