YouTube star Kina Grannis to visit Phl

Those of you out there who enjoy visiting YouTube and watching the videos posted there must have already seen and heard Kina Grannis. She is the girl in the video that features 288,000 jelly beans. Set to her own song, the sweet love song In Your Arms, the video is a stop-motion animation film that took 22 months to finish. It was directed by Greg Jardin and used a single still camera and over 2,460 frames.

I guess this means moving the beans one at a time, taking the shot and then repeating the process again and again until the film was finished. No wonder, it took them nearly two years. That was certainly a lot of hard work but In Your Arms soon proved itself worth all the effort. The video easily logged over 3.5 million YouTube views in just a little over three weeks and turned Kina into an international star.

Such success on the Internet did not go unnoticed. Ellen De Generes asked Kina to talk about the video and perform In Your Arms in the Ellen show. The Today Show, Good Morning America, E! News, Showbiz Insider on CNN, Inside Edition all came calling wanting to have Kina on the air. She was also featured in Billboard Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, Yahoo and MTV, among others. She was named the Best Web-Born Artist of 2011 at the MTV O Music Awards.

That amount of media exposure resulted in bigger success for In Your Arms. Soon the song was No. 1 in the iTunes Singer Songwriter chart. Even the album titled Stairwells that included In Your Arms, World In Front Of Me and Mr. Sun got a lot of attention and reappeared in Billboard’s Artist/Heatseekers hit list. It was now clear that the shy Kina had become unable to avoid fame. So the girl who used to hide her singing in deserted stairways or before stuffed animals in her room had to also turn performer.

And that is why Kina is now on her In Your Arms World Tour, meeting those fans who discovered her on YouTube and performing her hit songs live. She started in Dublin, Ireland on Feb. 1 and after visiting some European cities, she is now on the Asian leg that includes, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Manila. She will be performing at the Meralco Theater in Meralco Ave., Ortigas, Pasig on March 15.

Kina was born and grew up in Mission Viejo in California. She is of mixed European and Asian parentage. Her flair for writing songs showed itself as early as during the elementary grades when she would join songwriting contests. It was when she got to college at the University of Southern California that she went seriously into recording. Her first album, made up of light pop songs in a hopeful mood that she composed were Sincerely Me, One More In The Attic and In Memory Of The Singing Bridge.

Her songs interpreted in her simple but affecting style, have since then been heard in the soundtracks of TV shows like General Hospital, Samurai Girl, College Life and even on German TV. Her first video Message From Your Heart won the Doritos Crash The Superbowl contest. Among her prizes was having her video played during the commercials of Super Bowl XLII. Kina has also headlined a sold-out concert at the legendary Troubadour in Los Angeles.

 Let Kina show you the qualities that made her a YouTube star at the Meralco Theater at 8 p.m. on March 15. Enjoy the enchantment of what she creates with her sweet, hopeful songs. Who knows Kina might just be the inspiration that you have been looking for. It is not only radio or TV or movies that can create stars nowadays. It can also be done on YouTube.

By the way, just to show you that a music career is no deterrent to other endeavors, Kina graduated Summa Cum Laude from USC with a degree in Social Science major in Psychology. She is very active in raising funds for cancer research.

Tickets to Kina’s show are priced at P2,950; P1,950 orchestra; P1,450 lodge; and P950 balcony. To know more about Kina and for inquiries, visit www.kinagrannis.com or www.soulmannalive.com.