You wouldn’t think that making funny little short films could be stressful business but believe us, it can be. Since July the JibJab Team has been working almost around the clock on our Halloween and Christmas programming so when we started this project we had one motto… “Let’s just have fun!” You might think all…

Writing is always the big unknown when it comes to production planning. Sometimes the inspiration hits immediately, other times it’s like pulling teeth. With a ‘Year in Review’ there is the added uncertainty about what is going to happen between the time you write it and the time it is produced and released. This year,…

Before we get to the shot by shot breakdown of how we made the piece there are a few key steps that hold true for every project.  Once we have a tune selected and a fairly solid first pass on the script we will bust out our junky microphone and sing a pass directly into…

Once a script and/or scratch track are underway we typically take some time to scribble out our ideas. The goal of all this scribbling is never to make ‘beautiful Art’ but to help us figure out the best and funniest ways to communicate an idea or get a gag across. The storyboards are also refered…

The recording sessions are ALWAYS a good time!  The two main voices behind this piece are our go-to guys Jim Meskimen and Gabriel Mann.  Jim has been our lead character and voice guy since the pre-This Land days and you can check out his personal site here. This is our third Year in Review project…

When we started on this shot we all gravitated to the idea of a calendar turning pages. How else do you show all “the years that have passed in time”? Slowly the idea morphed into a timeline – like the ones in the history books with the dots on the important dates. Finally the timeline…

We’ve been making cut out images of President Bush dance around computer screens for 8 years so it was pretty rewarding to finally do it on a desktop! Because this whole video has a very ‘hand made’ feel we knew we wanted to incorporate the artists actual hands as much as possible. There is something…

Here’s a print sheet for Karzai and Abdullah Abdallah.  This was a great gag…

You just can’t go wrong when you have Ahmadinejad getting attacked by cute, blue, puffy birds!  Here is Ian showing how he created Iranian president… And here are the rest of the Ahmadinejad character assets… And finally, the Twitter birds.  We tried a few variations on the birds – some were cut out paper and…

We had a lot of ideas about this shot when we were getting started. Most of them revolved around the two guys chuggin’ beers with Obama on the White House lawn but 1) there is a lot of Obama in this video already and 2) we thought it was kinda funny to see Sgt. Crowley…

The fight cloud is one of earliest bits of animation for this project. We took some cotton balls, wire and tiny star stickers then cut random arms and legs from magazines and WALLAH! Instant cartoon fight! And here’s some of Romney’s characters, and Kevin on the down-shooter…

Who is that finger-biting man you may ask?  Well, it’s none other then our very own Dan Milano!  But don’t worry, no fingers were actually harmed durning the making of this scene.

This was one of the most fun scenes to produce and it goes by in the blink of an eye.  All of the characters are ACTUAL finger  puppets.  We painted our fingers to looks like fancy politician clothes then hot glued cut out heads to the tips of our fingers.  (If you have ever touched…

The only thing better then Sarah Palin going rogue is Sarah Palin going rogue while riding a moose! Here are some thumbnail drawings to help us figure out how they should move and below that is a quick scan of the poses on yellow post-its so we could actually ‘see it’ before taking the time…