Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Stop Motion Animation

Kina Grannis' first album, Stairwells, came out in 2010, and though she's not quite on the popularity level of A-list artists like Justin Timberlake, her YouTube channel has over 830,000 subscribers and her next album is due out this May. Kina is known for her YouTube covers, her beautiful original music, and her unique and creative videos. One of her most well-known videos is a music video for her original song, "In Your Arms," with over 10.2 millions views since it's release in November of 2011. Here's the music video:


This music video is far from ordinary. It was made using stop motion animation, a very detail-oriented and time-consuming method of animation, but one with an amazing result when executed well. In stop motion animation, objects that appear to move on their own are actually physically manipulated, placed frame by frame and photographed. The photographs are then made into a video, and it appears that these objects are moving fluidly and by themselves.

Kina Grannis and Greg Jardin, the director of the "In Your Arms" music video, took stop motion animation a step further and used jelly bean art. There are entire paintings made out of jelly beans that look incredibly accurate and interesting.



In the "In Your Arms" video, each and every frame was made of jelly beans, individually and precisely placed, to create the scenes you see her in during the video. Once the jelly beans were perfectly placed, a sheet of glass was placed over the box they were in and Kina lied on top of it, maneuvering herself into whatever position the director told her she was in in that exact frame, and then a picture was taken and the process began again. Each frame could take several hours, and there were approximately 2300 frames to shoot, so the video, in its entirety, took over a year to shoot. The end result was worth it, and as such a young and new artist, she created one of the most unique and interesting music videos the world has ever seen.

The "Making of..." video shows just how they went about making this video and how much and how many people went into it. 

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