The behind the scenes video shows details of the process. I found it fascinating: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIH4MJAC2Tg
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.)
—
† 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.