Office Max and JibJab are excited to usher 2009’s ElfYourself experience in tonight! ElfYourself has some amazing stuff built in this year, and we’ll be going through all the fun things you can do on this blog over the next few weeks. Wait, why are you still reading this? Go on and ElfYourself!
A teaser is ticking away over on a certain website. They’re coming…
We are in insane crunch mode right now as tech and art are wrapped for the holiday season. Nights are late, mornings are early and it can get pretty intense. So we started throwing these balls at each other. It’s cathartic! In fact, your blogger may have had a ball thrown at him after taking this photograph.
As amazing the Los Angeles area is for finding and working with talent, it isn’t known for being the hub of all things internet related. That distinction goes to the cities surrounding the San Francisco bay, and we are constantly traveling that way to attend conferences and discuss innovations in the online world so that we can harness new technologies. That’s why it was super awesome of YouTube to bring a huge chunk of their staff down the coast to Santa Monica today for the YouTube Roundtable, a discussion between YouTube and their partners.
We chatted it up with likes of Tay Zonday and that guy who started the Keyboard Cat trend, learning where YouTube plans to take things in the future. We’re most excited to start using YouTube as a community where people can share their Starring You videos. If you’ve never seen it, we’ve got an awesome collection of our favorite fan-made Starring Yous growing there. We search YouTube for new entries every week, but if we miss you, link to your upload and we’ll include it in the playlist!
Above, the guys from Wicked Awesome Films chat it up with Liam Kyle Sullivan.
We were astounded to see the Monster Mash show up on news channels all over the country last week, but the best part is that we totally have our awesome community of JibJab fans to thank. JibJabbers took to tweeting and facebooking personalized Monster Mashes at and on the pages of local news teams and cable shows like Fox and Friends, giving the newscasters a little something to laugh about and scoring some major on-air time! As a little thank you, we’re tracking down the folks that submitted JibJabs to their favorite anchors and awarding them with free t-shirts and free memberships! @TnMe, you’re first for JibJabbing the folks of Fox and Friends!
As we hit the holiday season, try JibJabbing your favorite action news team. If it makes air, shoot us a note and we’ll shoot you a membership and a t-shirt!
We got into the Halloween spirit at the office today, with costumes, candy and a bit of fun creative time drawing on gourds. You can see our collection below, and a few more of the pumpkins at Trish’s blog.
On a side note, we wanted to thank everyone who made the Monster Mash such a smash hit this Halloween. We’re skyrocketing at over 15 million Mashes watched as we blog, and can’t wait to see the grand tally once this Halloweekend is over. Rest assured, this is just a taste of the zany creative fun we have in store for the upcoming holiday season!
For those of you who missed it last night, NBC has posted Al’s performance of CNR live on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon… featuring JibJab’s music video! This won’t be available forever, so check it out. Click here or on the image below to watch it on Hulu.
Huzzah! We’ve been building up to this moment for months and now we’re happy to announce that JibJab pictures and videos have hit the Facebook Gift store, allowing the world to oh-so-easily post videos from our massive library to your friends Facebook walls on birthdays, holidays or whenever! You may have read about it last week in Wired or the New York Times, as Facebook rolled it out to small groups of their users at a time.
JibJab members will continue to get first word of new content as well as the ability to download and share via Facebook, while the Facebook option will be the best way to make one card or dance at a time using Facebook credits. In other words, JibJab.com is all you can eat, while Facebook will be one entrée at a time. Check Facebook’s FAQ and their blog for more information.
Tune into Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th and catch Weird Al Yankovic’s live performance of CNR! Its the first, or one of the first live performances of the song and we’re really excited to hear it, plus it doesn’t hurt that they’ll be playing the JibJab music video behind Al’s performance! Al is on air promoting his new album, The Essential Weird Al Yankovic, so don’t forget to pick that up as well!
We’ve shared a considerable amount of behind the scenes on this year’s projects, but having not had a full time blog running last year, now may be the perfect opportunity to show everyone how we put the infamous Zombie Party together. In this animatic/behind the scenes video, you’ll see that we had intricate undead hands and feet made up, employed gore galore and dragged our entire team into the mix to create the zaniest zombie bash ever created!
Don’t forget to see how it all turned out and put your head on a Zombie Party here!
We thought it was pretty awesome when self proclaimed news junkie Mike Bucc from Albany sent his favorite local TV news crew a Monster Mash starring the televised team… but wouldn’t you know it, they showed the video on the news that night and gave him a shout out! Double awesome! Since this cool happenstance, we’ve been scouring the net for local news crews and disc-jockeys that Mashed themselves. Many posted right to their Facebook fan pages… check it out!
105.3 KOOL FM, 107.1 FRANK FM, Good Morning Northwest, Sandbar Radio, KVST 99.7 FM, 101.5 WRAL FM, WPOR 101.9, NBC 25 news, Q104 Cleveland, The New Mix 106.3
We always get a kick out of how fans keep finding new ways to use JibJab Starring Yous. With Monster Mash this month, we’ve seen folks apply the technology into some new situations that were so awesome we had to share.
The Arizona Orthadontic Studio outside of Pheonix is running an all-orthadontist Monster Mash in their waiting room through this month.
Popular pop-rocker Hawk Nelson also used the mash to promote their new album.
We’re hearing about more Monster Mashes daily, including pet talk radio shows, college sports blogs and featuring the staff of Myrtle Beach’s O.D. Pavilion amusement park. Doing something original with your Monster Mash videos? Let us know and we’ll spread the word!
[UPDATE: The awesome staff at the Arizona Orthadontic Studio shot us a note and snapped us a photograph of their JibJabbing in action! Thanks guys!]
I am attaching a photo of our staff and myself (Dr Feldman) in our waiting room.
We normally show informational videos about orthodontics and dental care. BUT, when we found Jibjab, we created several videos of the staff ‘in action.’ Patients love watching their doctor and assistants rocking out in the Monster Mash. Perfect for the month of October.
Looking forward to more great work from Jibjab.
Blair Feldman DMD, MS
www.thesmilecreators.com
Take a look at the animatic from our Monster Mash video and you’ll see the skeleton behind the creation of a Starring You. Location concepts and character angles are decided right away and usually make it to the final cut, the dancing however is quite often left to interpretation. While the story remains the same, sometimes we snip out an idea or two, like those hot babes hanging out with Dracula. Sucks for him.
We’re so proud of the backgrounds our design team cooked up for the Monster Mash that we’re offering some of our favorites up at high resolution for you to use as your desktop wallpaper! Click the images below to nab a bigger version of them and right click to set as your desktop background. Some of these are concept art that didn’t make it into the mash, but they’re perfect for the spooky weeks ahead!
As Monster Mash soars over 7 million views, we continue to look behind the scenes. Its probably just as fun for us to act in Starring You videos as it is for our fans to cast their faces on the site. We’re lucky enough to have a staff full of goofballs who added quite a lot to the video, including booty shaking, finger waving and rump slapping. In particular, our Dracula had to have a great entrance, as he was the last character to show up in the Mash. We can credit Andy’s acting for the perfect cape reveal which we ended up using in the piece, even if he demands mocha lattes in between takes.
