Digging around our library to find turkey sketches yesterday, we also stumbled across these early animatics for “Be Thankful”. Watch these and get a great idea of the evolution our animations go through.

And of course, compare these to the final product here…

When designing a character that gets as much screen time as the turkey from Be Thankful, we go through many concepts and renditions. Check out our new Facebook album full of fowls that could have been!

When we’re developing new technologies, schedules move fast and change often.  That’s why our tech team rounds up once daily for a scrum meeting, a simple way of letting everyone know what has been accomplished, what is on the plate for the day and what hurdles may be in their way.  Having a daily development meeting keeps everyone up to date on each other and ensures that when any changes occur, they are addressed immediately.

Anyone who has thoroughly perused JibJab has probably noticed our intricate stop-motion animations.  There have been an array of amazing clay creatures seen on our site and this week we’ve been breathing life into this quirky little pine tree using the infamous frame by frame capture process.  It’s mind meltingly tedious work, but the end result is always something to be marveled at.  Here Devin, our master of claymation manipulates the tree’s trunk so that it can move and groove on our snowy set.  You’ll see this one with the rest of our holiday stuff in just a few months!

What’s with this blog?  It’s always us, us, us!  Today we want to turn the focus to a few causes that we’ve supported in the past and want to share for people to support through the future!  First up is Dallas Clayton’s children’s literacy project, the Awesome World Foundation.  Dallas is a JibJab friend who is a killer writer/illustrator and he’s turned his skills into a mission to both donate books and promote reading all across the country.  Check out his site, videos and books to learn more!

Operation Give’s “Operation Christmas Stocking” has also just gotten under way, an effort to fill the Christmas stockings of troops serving in Iraq.  Stockings ship early in November to get over there, so making a merry one means doing something before the season has officially begun!  Operation Give’s Director Paul Wilton and his group have been doing all sorts of amazing work over the years also getting toys, medical supplies and school materials to kids in Iraq.  In fact, Paul and the soldiers he works with were the faces we used in “Second Term!” Click the image below to see what you can do this year.

Our Soul Train contest was won by Kevin Lo, who made a funky Soul Train video starring his kids and amassed 100 people to press the “like” button on his Facebook wall. We think you’ll agree that it’s completely deserving of the win. Kevin will be receiving the package of prizes which we announced earlier this month, as well as a free year long subscription to JibJab!

Miss out on the contest? Well here’s your shot… we’re still accepting screen shots of your Soul Train dance on our Facebook wall for the next 24 hours. The top 9 with the most “likes” score year-long memberships along with Kevin! Unlimited JibJab access for a year!

Kevin’s adorable winning vid:

Official rules and posting procedure. Must be submitted by 11:59pm Pacific Time Friday September 25th.

With the fall season underway, we’re doing our part to get our Sports section filled up.  Our disgustingly dope design team came up with three sports stills this week, with a few more on the way (racing anyone?).  Check them out, especially the boxing one.  It features our marvelous new black eye technology!

For those who missed it streamed live, our presentation from TechCrunch50 (the ultimate conference for web start-ups) is now up.  The good folks over at Facebook Connect were incredibly awesome enough to let us talk as part of the Facebook Developer Garage presentation and Gregg wowed em with examples of how we integrated Facebook connect into our user experience.  You can check out the entire video, where Facebook famously announced that they are cash-flow positive, or click to the 28 minute mark where Gregg takes the stage.

Here at JibJab, we have an affinity for pirates. We work in a pirate ship, after all. That’s why in honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day this Saturday the 19th, we’re posting up a secret category with our favorite pirate stuff from the website, plus a few fun things we threw together. Give the image below a click and spread the scurvy all over the world wide web’s waters!

Honorable mention goes to the pirate fight scene in “He’s Barack Obama”.

Dave from our design team whipped this up today in response to Sammie’s Escape video