The crown jewel from our stash of new Valentines has to be Romeo & Juliet. In order to tell the greatest love story ever told, we had to condense it down to a minute, like we did in 2009 with Jowls and Shoot Your Eye Out. Check out the journey the story made, what we cut out and compare to how it ended up, by starring as Romeo and Juliet in Romeo & Juliet!
Shooting “Let’s Get Physical” at a gym was a ton of work for us, namely because of the mirrors. You know how gyms are, almost all weightlifting areas are completely surrounded by mirrored walls, making it an intense challenge to find good angles of our duo as they lifted without catching their reflections in one mirror or another, or the reflections of our crew. Still, even with our best attempts, some scenes required us to work a little magic and erase extraneous people from the final footage.
In the original video, that guy with the ladder moves through the background as the camera pans up. In order to erase a person behind that many layers of machinery with a camera in motion, Alan came up with the solution to photoshop a blank version of the mirrored wall and have it move in sync with the camera. It worked great, but he’ll admit… “that was kind of a nightmare”. Check out the seamless switch out when you cast yourself in the music video!
We’re pretty active when it comes to seeking out cool talented people to collaborate with, hunting down internet celebrities, taking hints from friends and browsing Youtube thoroughly. When Andy, our director of development stumbled across the YouTube video below, it pleaded to be transformed into a JibJab Sendable.
The makeouts were irresistible and prompted us to get right on the horn with the creator of the cartoon, Stephen Neary to chat him up about licensing. Wouldn’t you know it, he was in! We trimmed the song a little and now you can send it out as a valentine on our site! Sending this one really works two-fold, you support an awesome artist, and you may receive open mouthed kisses!
We’re trying something new this month with the help of TrialPay, a nifty service that gives you free goodies when you purchase stuff like Netflix subscriptions and online wine. Up until February 14th, when you purchase something through their site you’ll earn a 6-month JibJab membership as an incentive. All-in-all there are 17 ways to earn a free 6 month subscription, from ordering t-shirts at BustedTees.com to gift certificates at Restaurant.com. We recommend having flowers delivered to your Valentine… they go particularly well with eCards!
We have so many cool Valentine’s Day pieces to share that we hardly know where to start, so let’s begin with “Let’s Get Physical”! We were psyched last month to strike a deal which gave us the go-ahead to use the classic 1982 jam by Olivia Newton-John. In homage to her 80’s workout video, we hit the gym ourselves at the Marina Fitness Center in Marina Del Rey.
We pulled another all-nighter on this project, pushing ourselves to the max by shooting video until the break of dawn, but our efforts paid off in the form of one of our most ridiculous videos yet, a Valentine’s Day work out that’s sure to get your heart pumping. More on how we made it as February 14th approaches, until then, cast yourself and your Valentine for a great laugh!
We’ve just given our messaging system an overhaul and changed up our layout for sending and receiving cards, allowing you to add a note onto our eCards for special occasions and holidays.
This is the page that you will see when you are done creating an eCard. It is ready to be sent!
And this is what the person receiving your eCard will see. Clean, crisp and to the point!
The best way to see how we’ve restructured the cards is to try one out, and there’s no better area to give it a go than within our selection of new Valentine’s Day eCards (more on these this week). Spread the love!
Sometimes we need to update our database with a horde of new heads for use as background characters in videos, or just to update our business cards (which feature our faces). So we call impromptu photoshoots and nab a variety of photos for every occasion. Here is Phillip displaying a range of emotions that would make William Shakespeare proud!
Almost everyone in the company has a few dozen goofy photos taken of them as soon as they join. We’d post more, but those are for our eyes only.
Managing 40 computers of all shapes, makes and sizes is no easy task. Something is always buzzing, beeping or generally on the fritz and we’re lucky to have Mark around for when things go awry. When Mark isn’t working like crazy to keep our network alive at our datacenter, he is always ready to get his hands tangled in a mess of cords, unscrew a harddrive and rug burn his knees up to keep us all connected. Here is to you, oh fixer of computers!
We have a big ol’ whiteboard up in our studio that lets everyone know what date we need to aim for when wrapping animation on projects. Usually, taking a photo of this board would be giving away many months worth of stuff, but since we’re launching all of our new Valentine’s Day videos this Tuesday, February 2nd, we’re going to show you our upcoming slate and let your imaginations run wild for a few days!
Credit to Amia for the fun fonts and drawings. The best part? This isn’t even the half of it! Get ready!
We took far too many awesome photos while shooting our Figure Skating ‘Starring You’ not to share them all. For that everything we missed, check out our latest album of behind the scenes pictures posted up on Facebook!
To get the look of our skiing ‘Starring You’ video, we used half licensed footage of a real person skiing and half in studio footage of us playing around on skis in front of a green screen. The last step was creating an avalanche of snow for the ‘Starring You’ skier to escape. So we up and bought 20 pounds of baking soda, got out some black cloth and trash bags and got creative as we tried to recreate the look of moving snow.
We built miniature mountains, spun snow with drills attached to paper towel rolls and pushed loads of baking soda all over the ground, requiring a massive cleanup effort! Check out our array of techniques below and the finished video here!
Hail pelted the skylights above our studio today and caused a bit of a ruckus as our staff ran to catch a rare glimpse of ice falling from the sky in Southern California. Meanwhile, a week’s worth of torrential downpour has caused random power outages in our building, shutting down our computers more than a few times. We’re on our toes, saving our work every few minutes so that we don’t lose any progress!
Ouch. Grammar fail. When we put out our 2009 Year in Review, the images and text whizzed by too fast for most to get picky about sentence structure, but an eagle eyed fan found us out! In a customer support e-mail, a fan named Debbie wrote:
“You have an embarrassing grammatical error in your video, 0:17 minutes in. Please fire your copy writer for not knowing that “than” is a conjunction used in comparisons, not ‘then.’”
Embarrassing indeed! With our copy checkers blushing we quickly re-rendered the video and popped the correct lyric in there for a grammar win! Debbie got back to us after we alerted her to the change with
“Awesome! I didn’t think you guys would even acknowledge my email– let alone fix the problem! The email was sort of a joke but that’s pretty awesome that the video was actually edited. Now I love you guys even more! P.S. Sorry if I sounded pretentious, I didn’t think it would actually be read.”
Happy to help! So typos, tremble in fear at our user base, because they’re watching and we’re listening!
In order to get the awesome angles and movements of an airborne downhill skiier, we couldn’t follow suit with our figure skating video and shoot on location. Instead, Devin donned a whole mess of ski gear and made the moves for us against our green screen, sitting on ledges and wiggling his skiis around for a few hours.
While much safer than outdoor skiing, the situation was also much hotter. We wouldn’t be surprised if Devin lost a few pounds sweating it out in the snowsuit. We aren’t lying when we say we sweat the details! Check out the final version over here, where you can cast yourself as the skiier for free!
Several months ago we posted a flyer up at the Pickwick Gardens skating rink in Burbank, looking for a pair of professional figure skaters to show us their stuff and hopefully put on an impressive display for a new ‘Starring You’ video. Boy did we luck out!
Soon after our posting, we were contacted by Lloyd Eisler, two time Olympic medalist and 1993 World Champion figure skater, expressing his interest in the project and offering to bring in 2007 U.S. Adult pairs champion Choeleen Loundagin. The pair had been training to compete together at the 2010 U.S. Adult championships and happened to be available. Incredible! 
We took over the rink on a late October night after the facility had officially closed and shot footage all through the night until the break of dawn. There were a few close calls while carting our video equipment onto the slippery ice, but we can report no major tumbles or spills occurred while filming the figure skaters. It was exhausting but totally worthwhile work, as you can see from the finished product.
