Bring on Da Challenge ;): Kina Grannis - In Your Arms Stop Motion Music Video

If I had that many jellybeans... I’d be set for life!

I don’t even know how I stumbled upon that video, but I’m so glad I did. I was so awed when I was watching it—my jaw dropped. Working with Stop Motion before, I know how tedious it can be to have to take thousands of pictures just to have 3 minutes or so of footage. Also, it’s one thing to do it using real backgrounds. In Kina’s music video, the backgrounds were made up of jellybeans. That means that every frame required the tiny thousands of jellybeans to be moved. Now add to that, the requirement for her lip movements to match her song. Then there were also the little details of how her clothes and hair were laid out to represent movement and all of the additional props.

There were also little aspects of the video that relates back to my other classes (which I will briefly touch upon) that made it that much better.

Audio Production

Softwares such as Pro Tools 9 can be used to edit and create audio for post-production.

-the SFX to create the environment (i.e. crickets, birds landing, the balloons popping, snowball sounds etc.)

-editing her voice to establish the environment (at 1:25, when her voice has a little reverb because of the cave that she is in; at 2:43, her voice is muffled to create the illusion that she’s in space)

-the use of Foley to recreate the sounds of human movement (movement: her footstep sounds; prop handling: hand grabbing onto the balloons; and clothes movement: her clothes fluttering in the wind and when her ski clothes appear)

Media Tech Theory

The human persistence of vision is 1/10 of a second, so our brain holds an image that we see for that long, even after we have closed our eyes.

-using the persistence of vision to create smooth movement using still images

-at 3:16, the ‘television screen’ shuts off progressively, ending in the middle

Digital Media

Similar to Pro Tools, Adobe After Effects can be used to edit videos in post-production.

-at 2:37, either video effects were used to create the red flash or there was the use of external lighting in each frame

After watching this I had three burning questions:

How did she make the lip movements match her song, especially since she was doing stop motion?

At first, I thought they green screened her singing and just placed it on the thousands of still images of the jellybeans, hoping that it would all work out. I figured that they took the length of the song and calculated how many frames were required and at which frames she would be singing.

How in the world did they visualize each frame?

I wondered if they storyboard each frame after calculating the length of Kina’s song and then hoping her green screen would match with each background. However, I figured that there was too much left up to chance by doing that. I also wondered if they just did what I did in my previous projects and moved each row of jellybean up, down or across one by one... but then that might take forever. This brought me back to the persistence of vision lesson I learned in Media Tech Theory... so did they move a couple rows of jellybeans each frame? I thought there was still a better way... but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

How did they position each frame so it would be the same size after each shot and not be completely off from the previous frame?

Most likely, they positioned a camera permanently above the image. However, did they slide jellybeans across the image? If not, how were they sure where the next movement is, compared to the last frame?

Well, luckily, there is a behind-the-scenes video. If not, I think I would’ve died—those questions would have bothered me forever!