When we got the rights to use the classic Ronetts music track “Sleigh Ride” for the holiday season, we wanted to do something really amazing to fit in line with it.  Wanting to offer an adventurous sleigh ride through several locations called for miniatures and lead us to a magical winter world of ice cream…

We highlighted some amazing behind the scenes time lapse videos from animator Max Winston last week.  Now get a closer look at the incredible puppets he created for Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town in our Facebook photo album!

Jeff rocked this project, first planning out drawing and drawing the animatic below, then doing all the dancing.  Zowee! Warning, this will either ruin Feliz Navidad for you, or make it ten times better. Then the team got hard to work and we pulled together to create some amazing art and a sharp render of…

Thanks for checking out the behind the scenes section of  our 2010 Year in Review!  There’s always soooo much work that goes in to producing a two minute short so it’s always fun for us to shine a light on some of the efforts and processes that would otherwise go unnoticed.  Here you’ll find videos,…

In July at JibJab, we are 100% focused on Christmas. In August, it’s time for Year in Review. Clearly a lot will happen between August and December 31, so we start with three simple goals. First, identify a tune that will be well suited for a “list song” (a song whose lyrics will be comprised…

We’ve had so many requests to get the full lyrics all written out, so here they are for your reading pleasure! SO LONG TO YA, 2010 Sung to the tune of “Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” We arrived in ’09 on a rainbow of hope, But two thousand ten blew it all up…

Once we are feeling pretty good about where the script stands, we’ll start doing little drawings to help visualize the ideas.  We call these drawings ‘thumbnails’ because in the old days of animation that’s how big they drew them – the size of your thumbnail!  These drawings are not meant to be pretty, their sole…

Once again we had the privilege and pleasure of working with our good friend John Frizzle on the music track.  John is an insanely talented film composer and no matter what style track or genre of music we come at him with he is always able to turn it out! John’s credits include the scores…

For the first week or two of the projects the Art team was given the script and the freedom to do whatever they wanted. If they wanted to design characters, great. If they wanted to do storyboards, great. We did not even begin this project wed to the idea using puppets. Our main object was…

Making sure the lead characters were funny was one of the most important challenges the Art team faced. If we could make Obama and Biden funny then everything else would snap into place. In fact, the song was originally just Obama’s with an occasional throw to Biden but when Romney turned out some ‘buddy’ drawings…

An animatic is where we take the visual gags and ideas and start to lay them out into a timeline so we can see how they look and feel with the song.  As you can see from these samples, they are certainly not created to be pretty!  Mostly, animatics simply serve as guides for the…

One thing we pride ourselves on at JibJab is working with the absolute best of the best of the best.  Whether it’s an artist, musician, engineer or business person, we feel incredibly lucky to be able to work with GREAT people!  That’s why when we made the decision to go with puppets we immediately reached…

One of the hardest parts about producing a short film is having to scrap work that you absolutely LOVE because it doesn’t make the overall piece better.  There are always a handful of gems that get shut out for one reason or another and in this short we had to remove four puppets that Alex…

About halfway through the project we were all in the studio building puppets and Justin said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if the spinning JibJab logo were done with puppets?” It was such a simple but brilliant idea I think the rest of us were kicking ourselves that we didn’t up with it! It got tacked…

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do as much of this video as possible ‘in-camera’ .  This means that instead of using the computer to piece together all of the assets (puppets, sky, clouds, rainbow, etc.) we would film as much of it as we could.  For the opening shot we painted…