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Comment by pitdesi | Hacker News Reader

This is the type of thing that you wouldn't have done 10 years ago because noone would have found out about it.

Reminds me of the Amazing Honda Accord commercial - the Cog... Rube Goldberg machine all done without CGI (5 months of pre-work, then 605 takes until they got to one that didn't screw up somewhere) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo They did a lot of work that they could've avoided with CGI, but where would the fun be? Making of video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh4zWeUDW-E

Another good one that is similar in the sense that they went through a whole lot of trouble is the Sony Bravia commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NymcQJjPCs They did a lot of work that they could've avoided with CGI, but where would the fun be?

BTW, it seems Jelly Belly was in on the fun a little bit... http://www.jellybelly-uk.com/bean-world/page/?id=47 At the very least, I'd imagine that she didn't pay for the jelly beans

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Stop motion animation is quite old (Wikipedia says 1897). I did an animation course in the nineties and mixing stop motion with "pure" animation was considered a shortcut used in long animation films (usually for TV children films which are long and have low budgets). Granted this is an extreme case where stop motion (the sequences with Kina) is a complement to the full animation in the background thus not a time saving mechanism. The effect is impressive due to the bright colours of the jelly beans and the attention to detail in her sequences.

This work is comparable with sand art and sand animation and anyone who liked this should search for the nearest animation festival and check it out. One of the best ones in Europe is in Annecy, France but there many all over the world (search for animation festival). Many people dismiss animation (it is for children...) but these festivals are an emotional rollercoaster of short films that bring you to tears and laughter in under two minutes at a time.

If you attend one of these you will also be able to compare traditional animation with CGI. Each can be amazing on its own and, in my opinion, are two different things.

It's not about stop motion, it's about discovery and distribution ("going viral").

Although I'm not sure about that. Several MTV-age music videos became famous because of clever technique (such as "Money for Nothing") and Honda commercial was a regular TV-commercial. Especially Super Bowl commercials are know to be high-value productions pre-Internet.

All these are predated by the 1987 video "Der Lauf der Dinge" (The way things go) by Fischli and Weiss. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhVsMmkAM . I think that also before youtube these type of things were done and people found out about it.

Thanks for the link, I saw this maybe 20 years ago on TV, it was stuck in me for very long but I could never find it again. No it is there, fresh and delicate. Of-topic however: Der Lauf der Dinge is memorable, it has a strong personal flavor while it can be understood by anyone on earth, it has no polish or sex-appeal but it catching one's eyes, it leaves by itself, it has an autonomous existence, bref it is art. The OP is nothing of the sort.

The one I remember from my childhood was the intro to The Great Egg Race (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx8peNet8Sg) from the late '70s.

There's also the Sony Bravia Paint commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3tZPH5my-0&feature=relat...

And their bouncy ball commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMl5l6mOySU

> This is the type of thing that you wouldn't have done 10 years ago because noone would have found out about it.

Stop motion videos and music has been done before. Probably the most well known is 1986's "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel. Interestingly, it was filmed by the folks who would later bring us Wallace and Gromit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqyc37aOqT0

Another one of Kina's videos also seem to go the artistic route - in this case using DVD cases as dominoes with a flip art effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=840NbiFF1zM&feature=relmf...

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