Tuesday, November 8, 2011

A stop-action music video

There is no economics in the lyrics of the this video, but there certainly are some in its production. It is was produced frame by frame with stop-action animation with jelly beans and a real person and took, according to the credits, 1357 hours to create.  I suspect that the 1357 hours was the time only for the creating of the stop-action part, not for the planning. I had not previously heard of the singer, Kina Grannis, but she has been using the Internet rather than a record label to develop her audience, and this video, which had over a million views in its first three days, certainly will help grow it. Her production team also released a video on youtube explaining how they made the video, which increases one's awe at the final product.

If the cost of an hour was $100, which is probably unreasonably low given the number of people involved in the project, the cost of producing the video would have been $136,000 for a three-and-a-half minute video that is available free. I suspect the cost was several times that, and the artist is not a big name. How do you justify that kind of effort and expenditure on a project like this? On the other hand, seeing the result, the risk was probably worth it and it may be one of the smartest investment of time and money of any music video.

(Found on Cafe Hayek.)

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