Comments on: How many words are 288,000 jelly beans worth?

How many words are 288,000 jelly beans worth?

notbuddha — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:51:15 -0800

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:57:39 -0800

Nice, though I think the jellybeans sort of outclass the singer a bit. WC Fields supposedly said "Never work with children or animals." Add jellybeans, I guess.

By: Llama-Lime

Llama-Lime — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:07:09 -0800

Sweet, sweet pointillism.

By: mrgroweler

mrgroweler — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:08:37 -0800

Wow I enjoyed that and I love people that have such dedication to a concept.

By: kaibutsu

kaibutsu — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:14:01 -0800

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, God said, "Let there be lips." And there were. And they were good lips. And they sang...

By: Greg_Ace

Greg_Ace — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:16:49 -0800

Too bad they couldn't find a soundtrack that lives up to the awesomeness of the visual presentation.

By: hermitosis

hermitosis — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:17:58 -0800

Wow, someone spent so much time making those flesh-colored jellybirds with blank dead eyes.

By: MtDewd

MtDewd — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:21:02 -0800

Nice touch with the TV snow and colorbars at the end.

By: TangerineGurl

TangerineGurl — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:25:16 -0800

Huge Kina Grannis fan and was delighted to see the finished video. Great post!

By: sunshinesky

sunshinesky — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:40:14 -0800

My first reaction to the amount of effort required was "What a waste". Then I remembered that dedication of this nature is part of why I respect artists. They don't care how much time it takes to make something unique and wonderful. They do it for the love of the process and to share something beautiful with the world. Great concept, fantastic product.

By: verb

verb — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:44:37 -0800

Really liked that video a lot. Unfortunately my wife heard it from the other room, and shouted, "Is that Zoe Deschanel? Did she make another fucking song?" She has opinions on Zoe Deschanel, and I can't really disagree.

By: vidur

vidur — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:45:37 -0800

Nice effort, but can they fill a Boeing 747 with jellybeans and let me know the count?

By: YAMWAK

YAMWAK — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:48:15 -0800

Heh - I thought 'how can this be cost-effective?' Then I realised I was watching a music video I wouldn't have otherwise watched done by someone I hadn't heard of before. I'm not saying I'm going to rush out and buy the album, but I enjoyed the song. Video reminded me too much of Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' for me to be really pulled in.

By: lupus_yonderboy

lupus_yonderboy — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:54:38 -0800

Sigh. I love the idea, I wish I cared even a little about a) the music or b) the actual images presented. It's all so formulaic from start to finish, it makes me sad. I guess it does capture that "dramatic waste of huge quantities of manufactured goods" that's such a staple of our artforms these days and that our grandchildren will look back upon angrily.

By: BurnChao

BurnChao — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:02:32 -0800

What did they do with the jelly beans after taking a picture of them? Cause I'm hungry.

By: lupus_yonderboy

lupus_yonderboy — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:08:25 -0800

BurnChao: let's hope they didn't eat each one of them... Since a jellybean weighs 1.1 grams, that's about 317kg or 700 pounds of jellybeans... rather a lot, really!

By: woodblock100

woodblock100 — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:30:51 -0800

"Here's to the crazy ones ..."

By: shucksitsjeremy

shucksitsjeremy — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:36:43 -0800

The director also did the video for Hollerado's "Americanarama"

By: fiercecupcake

fiercecupcake — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:36:53 -0800

That's a whole thing of candy beans!

By: hincandenza

hincandenza — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:47:28 -0800

Maybe it's the software geek in me, but when I was watching that behind the scenes video and how they'd lay out the jelly beans by hand, I couldn't help have as my first thought "Jeez, in far less than two years you could make a machine that automatically draw any image using jelly bean pixels in an x/y grid, and save yourself most of the time it took to draw the images." To 'draw' a picture the software would move/open the slots for each 'pixel' that needed green apple, and then open the valve with a big bucket of green apple raining down into the slots as needed. Then it'd close those and open the 'Cherry Red', etc, etc. This would all be done by software and electronically controlled gates. It'd probably 'draw' a picture in < 1 minute, similar to the cutting edge technology involved in looms (which for James Burke fans were in a way something of a precursor to modern computers). Take your picture, then push a button to dump all the jelly beans into a disposal tray and draw the next 'image'. Separate software could then auto-sort them by color to be reused in the vats, so every few images someone would collect from the sorting bins to reload the jelly bean "toner". I figure a smart team could make such a thing in... maybe a month, maybe two? In the mean time a separate team would be making the video images with a stand-in model to do the poses. When the singer comes in, you draw the image while you're posing her to match the stand-in's pose. If your target video is 15 frames/sec video, you would probably do 45 frames an hour, or 3 seconds of video in an hour. That means a minute of video for every 20 hours (or a full week of the singer coming in for ~4 hours a day). If she was committed to it, which she presumably would be if she commissioned this work, they'd bang out the whole video in under a month- less if they worked longer days. Even less if they made 3 or 4 such machines side by side, so they were drawing new images constantly and the singer was just moving over and posing again more often than once a minute or so. I figure if done right, there's two months of video creation, machining, software, and prep, and another month of shooting. Add in a week or so to stitch it together and reshoot any problematic frames, and bam- 3 months later you have the video. But I guess this is why I'm in software, and not an artist.

By: pmcp

pmcp — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:57:47 -0800

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, God said, "Let there be lips." And there were. And they were good lips. And they sang... I see that a raise you one Beckett. (starts at about 2:50)

By: Glinn

Glinn — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:39:36 -0800

Then I realised I was watching a music video I wouldn't have otherwise watched done by someone I hadn't heard of before. I had the same thought. I enjoyed it well enough, but by the end I was watching for the jellybeans and wasn't so interested in the song.

By: Twang

Twang — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:43:21 -0800

And now, without further commercial interruption ... Matrix IV (Agent Smith goes to Washington) with all backgrounds in stop-motion jellybeans! Sometimes life is stranger than science-fiction.

By: Zephyrial

Zephyrial — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:15:28 -0800

hincandenza: "Jeez, in far less than two years you could make a machine that automatically draw any image using jelly bean pixels in an x/y grid, and save yourself most of the time it took to draw the images." Your idea is interesting, but if you watch the behind-the-scenes video closely, you'll notice that they're not dealing with a simple grid of pixels; the jellybeans aren't perfectly round (or square), and so the images they form are more akin to vector art than a grid of colored pixels (i.e. much more to do with filling each irregular shape with this or that color, rather than x=1 y=1 color=black). I'm not saying their method of doing this was time-effective, but it did achieve an effect that I don't know would be easily replicable using a machine.

By: escabeche

escabeche — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:42:11 -0800

You guys you guys! My awesome cousin Daphne Raves produced this. She starts talking at 1:33 of the "making of" video. She has been trying to explain what this is at every family event for the past two years. At last I understand what the hell she was talking about.

By: valkyryn

valkyryn — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:44:16 -0800

So, instead of bubblegum pop, we now have jellybean pop? And if anyone asks, this is why we use CGI instead of stop-motion special effects. Looks cool, really fun, but two years for three minutes of footage does not a feature film make.

By: serena15221

serena15221 — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:47:48 -0800

Finally, a good use for jelly beans.

By: ShutterBun

ShutterBun — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:17:15 -0800

2 jelly beans for each Jevovah's Witness in heaven?

By: arnicae

arnicae — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:33:01 -0800

This is highly cool, but wow, someone has way too much time on their hands.

By: TangerineGurl

TangerineGurl — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:36:15 -0800

Kina Grannis is the "Gotta Dig" girl from diggnation 131. She Crashed The SuperBowl ... ..she's MAKING a living! Saw her LIVE in ATL.

By: LionIndex

LionIndex — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:53:13 -0800

Man, can't I just have some?

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:14:38 -0800

This is great, thank you for linking it here. Talk about a labor of love - I'm glad they did this, and glad they made a suitably descriptive making-of video, and I'm impressed with the ingenuity they showed to get some of those effects. And jealous! I hope they get good mileage out of this - more funding to make fun projects like this.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:15:47 -0800

Tell your cousin her project is way cool, escabeche.

By: jonbro

jonbro — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 04:53:47 -0800

IRT the jelly bean arrangement machine, that is the exact same thought that I had watching this video. I think that the point about it not working with with an x/y grid due to space packing issues is a good one, and something that I hadn't thought about though. One solution that you could have is make the whole table angled with a plate one jelly bean depth above it so that gravity shifts the jellybeans into place. you would have to account for shifting on the downward side of the image though. It would solve the space packing pretty well. I bet that modeling the physical interactions of falling jellybeans wouldn't be that hard, especially if they were sliding into place, rather than falling. You could also use a brand like jelly belly that has quite uniform beans if you wanted to make it easier. I feel like I have seen a machine that does this already, using black and white ping pong balls instead of jelly beans. It may have drawn a portrait of marilyn monroe?

By: Gelatin

Gelatin — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:40:56 -0800

I watched the making-of video and was impressed that they made an animated version of the storyboards as a reference. Let's face it, they could have stopped with the green screen footage of Kina Grannis and simple computer animation and called it a day. i'm impressed with their dedication and the results. And the song is nice -- nothing earth-shaking, but pleasant.

By: TangerineGurl

TangerineGurl — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:11:41 -0800

One Million Views in 3 days. Not bad.