No MVP here - they went all the way the first time. Be sure to switch to 1080p and go full screen, it's breathtaking. But it makes me wonder, what is the ROI on this? Will they really make back the wages of 30 people for 22 months, and how long will it take?
Will they really make back the wages of 30 people for 22 months
The actual people moving the jelly beans into position were, according to the making-of video, unpaid. Music is like video games, movies, journalism, political campaigns, etc: grunt work gets done by an undercaste of young people "paying their dues" with the promise that they will be allowed to graduate to the interesting, high status stuff if they just stick with it a little while longer. (This is a lie.)
There's also just friends of friends that participate because they think that it's fun. I know of several people that would enjoy participating in such a project just because they find it fun.
The ROI is creating something incredible that you can be proud of forever. This is art! I hope people will always have the courage to create amazing things without worrying about the financials.
Even if the people were being paid $50/hour, which is unlikely considering I assume most of them will be volunteers, that comes out to about $50,000.
They said they used 288,000 jelly beans.
There is roughly 400 jelly beans per pound.
You can buy bulk jelly beans for $85 for 10lbs.
Which comes out to $61,200 for the jelly beans. I'm sure they could get a non-name brand or bulk discount so it could be much less.
So definitely less $100,000 for the music video.
They can make that money back pretty quickly if they become a YouTube partner and the video goes viral. They would only need about 50million views to pay back the costs of making the video.
Your math is off on the Jelly beans. 288,000 / 400 = 720 Pounds. JellyBelly Jelly Beans Retail on Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Jelly-Belly-Assorted-Flavors-3-Pound/d...) for $9/pound. So, even if they didn't buy them wholesale (hard to believe) - it's still only $6480 worth of jelly beans.
There's a plug for the 'jelly belly' brand at the end of the video where they show their logo, I'm pretty sure that means they would have either gotten them for free or they sponsored the video.
That (they had to have a good time making it), and the purely promotional reason of this is in their portfolio! If they we're bidding on a job for me and they showed me this I would throw money at them. Dedication, quality, and creativity.
That's not true, there were several versions to prove the concept. Before they went all out, they created a story board of each scene, then they animated it and then they went for it.
