In these days of social media and attention spans the size of an ant it’s increasingly hard to get yourself noticed amongst all the noise. What you need is a gimmick. That’s exactly what Kina Grannis thought when she came up with her hair-brained by totally genius idea of making a music video out of 288,000 Jelly Belly jelly beans.
So why is it genius? Firstly, she didn’t buy the 288,000 jelly beans. That would cost her a fortune and given she started the project while she was still in high school something that would be out of reach for most teenagers. Instead she approached Jelly Belly, one of the biggest makers of jelly beans in the world, who signed on to the idea and are currently doing all the hard promo work for her video online.
“We never expected it to take that long so it definitely got frustrating at times. But we all believed in it so much and we were so invested in it,” Grannis said in an interview with Fox News. “And it was cool because at the end of every day we could see the progress we made, so that helped a little bit.”
According to Jelly Belly the music video was made with 288,000 Jelly Belly jelly beans, spread throughout 2,460 frames, filmed across 1,357 hours.
“Basically, he (director Greg Jardin) built a little cable casing so each individual frame of the video would be projected down onto this little table, and then people would spend the next hour placing the jellybeans in to coordinate with the picture,” Grannis explained. “Then they put a piece of plexi glass down and then I would lie down on top of that and we would spend the next fifteen minutes getting me into an exact position and then we take a picture and then we start all over again, so it was pretty tedious.”
The video has been an instant hit, gathering just over 3 million views since it was unveiled on Youtube a fortnight ago. For a singer that no-one had heard of before this has to be considered a smash hit.
But the people really licking their lips, apart from us after watching the video, are Jelly Belly who are running a huge social media campaign to try and gather more Facebook friends. It’s also worthwhile considering that what we’re really looking at is 3 minute advertisement for Jelly Belly.
But who cares? This video seems like a win-win and until people start yelling ‘sell out’ we may be about to see a large number of musicians and brands attempt to emulate this campaigns success. We’ve seen the future of online music promotion, and it sure is tasty.
You can watch the music video below, and if you’re interested also check out the making of video below it.
