OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine - Official Video

Not really. Stop-motion music videos have been done quite a bit, especially 10 years ago and more. There was a time before CGI when artists shot "videos" on film and computers weren't capable of the things they are today. Consider the Peter Gabriel videos: [link] [link] both of which feature various types of stop-motion animation as well as other effects. Also consider the works of Bruce Bickford whom Frank Zappa hired to work on several videos. This guy is a genius/savant, I don't know which. Zappa saw the genius and funded some incredible work. [link] [link] [link] You also might want to check out: [this video] and their other videos, which aren't stop-motion but are incredible videos made without CGI. There's tons more out there to find if you look.

This video would be pretty uninteresting had they used artificial jelly beans. I think everyone is aware that it’s trivial to convert a simple animation to a jelly bean animation. That’s not the point. Art works by different rules. (Hey, and if you like to be a cynic about it you can also say that viral videos work by different rules. OK Go owes their fame to never taking shortcuts when creating their music videos†.) (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: [this video]