Although music videos are a rare sight on MTV, the channel that made them popular, YouTube is overflowing with them. One unique video by singer-songwriter Kina Grannis is done in stop-motion with jelly beans.
The video for the very catchy “In Your Arms” took 288,000 jelly beans and almost two years to complete. Here it is in its entirety:
The video, directed by Greg Jardin, features Grannis against an animated jelly bean backdrop, going through all four seasons, complete with snowballs, before being transported into the jelly bean world herself. Fortunately, she re-emerges into the real world to become an astronaut.
The neat thing is that she did this without the normal practice of using a blue or green screen and just chroma-keying her onto the background. She actually had to lay on the table with the all of the jelly beans that had been painstakingly onto a piece of glass. And considering there up to 30 frames in each second of video, and she’s in most of them makes this feat even more impressive.
Greg Jardin got the idea from seeing jelly bean portraits of famous people and recreations of famous paintings, as detailed in a “making of” video. He called Kina Grannis while she was at dinner and explained the concept. He then storyboarded the concept and did a rough animation on a computer to serve as a guide for the 30 people who worked on the video, doing everything from placing jelly beans to lighting. From start to finish, the project took, as mentioned on the video’s YouTube page, “22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, 1 still camera, and 288,000 jelly beans.”
If this song is stuck in your head and you’d like to hear more of her, the good news is that Kina Grannis is currently on tour, presumably without any jelly beans. You can see some more interesting videos with our list of stop motion/comics/8-bit videos and our post on animated sticky notes.
