Stop motion video shot over 2 years with 288,000 jelly beans
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
http://indigitalmarketing.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/digg-help...
For nearly two years they kept working on it and she couldn't really put on any weight, couldn't really age too much, etc. It really is dedication!
I am reminded of oscar wilde: "All art is useless."
This is one of the only useful definitions of "art," which is otherwise a concept very tricky to pin down, it is that which serves no purpose other than to delight.
Also they only shot 2300 whereas the clip at 24 fps would have taken 4920 though the 'real' frame seems to be lower. Finally moving around jelly beans is a lot easier than setting up the scene from scratch, as mentioned, a frame took 5 minutes to 3 hours to setup.
tl dr: I would like to see more technical behind-the-sceens.
She implied it when she said that after every day, they could see the progression up until that point.
And yes, they could've have created a simple animation (which they did anyway), and then convert it to jelly beans with a relatively simple code in Processing.
(I think that placing the singer directly on the jelly beans allowed them to do certain tricks that would be harder to accomplish otherwise: pay attention to the lighting or the costume changes. It’s not clear to me whether using a green screen would really have saved time.)
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† One example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
What is wrong with these people who think that the world would be a better place if everyone was exactly like them? There seems to be an increasing concentration of them here.
There is more than one kind of wealth in the world.
You're missing the point.(I watched the first 20 seconds of the clip and realised I only cared because the chick was hot, and the jelly beans could have been cgi for all I care)
When you do something you love, streamlining the process -- removing stuff you love from your life -- is counterproductive.
Consider that people climb mountains they could hire helicopters to get to the top of. They train for months to run marathons they could drive in a car in under an hour. They change their children's diapers they could hire a nanny to do.
The grammar nerd in me is also impressed how, for two years, no one managed to notice that the repeated phrase "we'll lay," although it rhymes in context, uses completely the wrong verb. (It should be "we'll lie.")
I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lay like this forever,
Until the sky falls down on me...
I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lie like this forever,
Until the sky falls down on me...Which is roughly 62 hours a month.
Even if the people were being paid $50/hour, which is unlikely considering I assume most of them will be volunteers, that comes out to about $50,000.
They said they used 288,000 jelly beans. There is roughly 400 jelly beans per pound. You can buy bulk jelly beans for $85 for 10lbs.
Which comes out to $61,200 for the jelly beans. I'm sure they could get a non-name brand or bulk discount so it could be much less.
So definitely less $100,000 for the music video.
They can make that money back pretty quickly if they become a YouTube partner and the video goes viral. They would only need about 50million views to pay back the costs of making the video.
Plus, how can you put a price on art?
The actual people moving the jelly beans into position were, according to the making-of video, unpaid. Music is like video games, movies, journalism, political campaigns, etc: grunt work gets done by an undercaste of young people "paying their dues" with the promise that they will be allowed to graduate to the interesting, high status stuff if they just stick with it a little while longer. (This is a lie.)
Coldplay - Strawberry Swing (shot on sidewalk chalk)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb9X5jMofEo
Maxmaber Orkestar - Malinkovec Valzer (500 People in 100 Seconds - stop-motion video is a movie within a movie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eqSZSO_sSE
Clarika - Bien Mérité (French stop-motion video with photographs)
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/sy-25142343/eurythmics_mission... ( doesn't play on is devices)
This is the plot line of several Star Trek episodes as well as many SciFi short stories/novels.
If you consider that big budget music videos can have ~100 people working on it (casting, production crew and post crew) each putting in at least 12-16 hours, this falls right in line with the amount of people hours that's typical for a music label.
8 hours a day * 200 working days = 1600 hours
With 30 people working just a week (5 days), we're already at 1200 hours.
Maybe they got their hours wrong? Or it's not that impressive (I'm a grumpy old man).
Spreading 1300 manhours for 30 people over 22 months seems a bit thinly spread as well, if you ask me.
Reminds me of the Amazing Honda Accord commercial - the Cog... Rube Goldberg machine all done without CGI (5 months of pre-work, then 605 takes until they got to one that didn't screw up somewhere) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo They did a lot of work that they could've avoided with CGI, but where would the fun be? Making of video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh4zWeUDW-E
Another good one that is similar in the sense that they went through a whole lot of trouble is the Sony Bravia commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NymcQJjPCs They did a lot of work that they could've avoided with CGI, but where would the fun be?
BTW, it seems Jelly Belly was in on the fun a little bit... http://www.jellybelly-uk.com/bean-world/page/?id=47 At the very least, I'd imagine that she didn't pay for the jelly beans
This work is comparable with sand art and sand animation and anyone who liked this should search for the nearest animation festival and check it out. One of the best ones in Europe is in Annecy, France but there many all over the world (search for animation festival). Many people dismiss animation (it is for children...) but these festivals are an emotional rollercoaster of short films that bring you to tears and laughter in under two minutes at a time.
If you attend one of these you will also be able to compare traditional animation with CGI. Each can be amazing on its own and, in my opinion, are two different things.
Although I'm not sure about that. Several MTV-age music videos became famous because of clever technique (such as "Money for Nothing") and Honda commercial was a regular TV-commercial. Especially Super Bowl commercials are know to be high-value productions pre-Internet.
Stop motion videos and music has been done before. Probably the most well known is 1986's "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel. Interestingly, it was filmed by the folks who would later bring us Wallace and Gromit.
Not to detract from it, but is the 1,357 hours combined man-hours, or start-to-finish hours?
The reason is because of how this post got on the front page of Hacker News.In normal circumstances I can bet that this post maybe would get like three votes in five hours.But in this case the poster is "swombat" who has a huge following on twitter and a lot of them are hnusers.I noticed an instant upsurge in votes after he posted this on his twitter page.
Another reason is because "swombat" himself is also one of the top Hacker News users and when people see his name there chances of upvoting increases significantly.This I think is actually fair and he probably deserves a little more attention than the average hnuser.But what I vehemently object to is the use of twitter to gain traction.
Here are some possible solutions that I can think of.
1) If a post gets a lot of traffic from twitter and other such social media websites ,it should work against it in the rank calculation algorithm.
2) Users be advised to not use their twitter or facebook following to gain traction on HackerNews.
EDIT: Okay I get it.
From HN Guidelines
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"
Sorry I was not aware of that.
Well its possible but I am not buying that right now.
What I would buy is that maybe I have not reached a sufficient level of karma to comment on Hacker News administration.
I will agree that there is hive minded voting - I've complained about it plenty of times - but in this case I think my up vote made sense and that's without me realizing who was posting it (just like I didn't bother even seeing what your handle was until I started typing this). Hope that gives you a point of view from one person (who didn't down vote you).
>1) If a post gets a lot of traffic from twitter and other such social media websites ,it should work against it in the rank calculation algorithm.
If you could find a way to do this, I think it could make HN better in general. The problem is that it'd be a whack-a-mole situation. This is just how publicity works. If you know people, and you are trying to get the word out about something, you tell the people you know, and they help you out. This is what it means to have a network.
I mean, it's kindof interesting; I mean, I talk about the problems of "who you know rather than what you know" but you know what? when I go to look for a job, who do I ask? the people I know. And it usually nets me a pretty good job. When I want to hire people, where do I look? the people I know, and often it gets me good people.
But yeah; in other situations, that's called nepotism, and has some rather large perverse incentives. I mean, in my case, I wholly own my company, so if I want to hire my siblings, well, it's my money, right? And sometimes, I think it makes sense. I've been trying to outsource my bookkeeping type work for some time now. But the primary qualifications are trustworthiness and diligence, and, well, switching bookkeepers when you want to do as little of the bookkeeping work as I do is rather hard, so I'd also like someone who will stick around longer than most people stick with me. Certainly for the first, who can I trust more than my sister? and I know she's pretty diligent; we grew up together. Add to that, she has a degree in fine arts and few job prospects that can pay more than I can, so it's all around a win.
Terminological pickiness aside, this is very cool. I wasn't aware of Kina Grannis before, and probably would have stayed that way but for this video, so it seems to be accomplishing its purpose.
Edited to add: the song is pretty, too.
[They set up a scene, took a photo]*numFrames. This is stop motion photography as much "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is.
Stop-motion doesn't slow things down; it's a technique where you expose one frame of film, move something (usually a model) slightly, and expose the next frame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion
Stop-motion animation examples include the original King Kong, Sinbad and all those other Ray Harryhausen films, the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes Back. (And there was also a technique called "Go motion" animation where the puppet was moved during the frame exposure, thus causing motion blur, and making for a much more realistic animation, which was used for the dragon in DragonSlayer and I think some of Return of the Jedi.)
If you want to get really pedantic, probably the best term for this jellybean video is "pixilation". I know we use that word differently nowadays, but before computer graphics were common, "pixilation" was the term for stop-motion animated real-world objects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixilation
Thank you for letting my nearly pointless film degree not go entirely to waste.
That's what I get for posting when tired... gotta get some sleep.