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!

A lot of blood, sweat, tears and holiday cheer went into delivering this, a mind boggling amount of holiday content! We’ll be highlighting these pieces and the late nights that went into creating them as we plow through the next few months, but for now, check out our filtering system for the holidays, which will guide you to our new movies and cast 1-5 people in our huge catalog of FREE holiday photos!

Again, stop reading this blog and go have some fun!

While everyone is finding their inner elves via ElfYourself, we wanted to make sure that the new Thanksgiving art and animations our team designed for 2009 don’t go unnoticed! Last year we were so busy, we didn’t get to launch any postables, so we made up for it this year with some instant classics. From touchdown plays to familiar looking villagers, we think these Plymouth inspired postables would make profile pictures that rock!

In addition, at this very moment we’re launching a foot tapping 70’s inspired jam called Jive Turkey! It’s gravy, baby!

The ElfYourself experience is rolling and we wanted to highlight some of the new gifts, available only in our ElfYourself store! Along with the usual greeting cards, mousepads and mugs, you now have the option to get your face on playing cards, ornaments and BLANKETS!

Of course, any new products we considered went through tons of testing. And that meant putting employee heads on early models of the blankets, creating abominations like this cozy clone comforter.

We have dozens of those test blankets hanging around. Too bad it doesn’t get freezing cold in Southern California. As the holidays approach make sure to get your orders in soon for the best pricing! Since these are created individually, it can take up to a week to manufacture and without premium shipping, up to an additional 14 days for the USPS to deliver. We would recommend ordering before December 3rd for the best rate, and before December 11th to make it in time for Christmas!

In today’s blog we wanted to feature one of the coolest uses of Starring You we’ve seen… celebrities retweeting and sharing fan-made JibJabs. Just because we think it’s awesome. So pardon us as we go from behind the scenes production blog to gossip rag, because cere are some celebrity endorsed Starring Yous that we’ve seen over the last few months!

Alyssa Milano got her Elf on yesterday, retweeting a fan-made ElfYourself featuring many-a-popular tweeter. This was thanks to JibJabber KittCameo who was on a roll tweeting out ElfYourself vids. He also nabbed a retweet from Nia Vardalos, of Greek Wedding and Life in Ruins fame, and had the peeps of Project Runway laughing!

Musicians have been huge as well… American Idol favorite Adam Lambert tweeted this fan-made Monster Mash with a laugh. Limp Bizkit header Fred Durst showed some love for the Chippendales by announcing this fan-made video to be the latest Limp Bizkit music video. Is there any higher honor?

Mrs. Kutcher herself, Demi Moore passed along some disco JibJab goodness from the twitter-verse… we completed the link here. Greg Grunberg of Heroes fame practically dared users to retweet his Chippendales dance, but he owed the original creation to a fan.

So what did we learn here? Well, there’s pretty much no better way to get some props from your favorite people then by sending them a video starring… themselves! Luckily for you, we have 5 ElfYourself videos waiting to be personalized.

One question we get quite often is “how do you make a Starring You video?”. It’s a simple process, but we found it kind of hard to sum up without visual accompaniment. While you can find instructions while making a video and additional information in our FAQ, we’ve decided to go another step and create a few tutorial videos for first-time JibJabbers.

Here is a tutorial for the new ElfYourself site…

And here is a tutorial for general JibJab Starring You videos on JibJab.com!

Enjoy!

[UPDATE: Wohoo! Submissions are closed and we sent out over two dozen memberships to vets and active service members! Thanks everyone, and keep your eyes peeled for more giveaways on our Facebook and Twitter!]

To honor the amazing men and women who work hard to protect our freedom, we want to extend free 1 year JibJab Memberships to all active duty service members from all branches of the military. It’s the least we could do to thank those of you currently sacrificing so much so that we can live in a country that allows us make a living making things that make people laugh. To qualify, you must send an email to jibjabservicemembers (at) gmail (dot) com in the next 48 hours with the following information so that we can verify your active duty status:

First Name
Last Name
Branch of Military
Date of Birth

Please note that this offer is a Veteran’s Day special thank you and that the email above will only be valid for the next 48 hours.

Happy Veterans Day!

Yeah, this is a recycled image from back after the 2004 election but the sentiment still holds!

We’ve seen some great shout outs from friends and press since we launched ElfYourself 2009, and we’re so excited, we just had to share them!

TechCrunch had a leg up on the story and posted last night… it wasn’t long before Mashable got in the mix… we were lucky enough for CNN Money to run the press release… and CNET joined in the geeky fun with their own coverage!

But maybe most exciting of all, we had an appearance on Ellen today! You can see Ellen, her mom and co dancing ElfYourself style in her episode recap at the 2:40 mark. She credits her mom’s choreography

What a whirlwind of a first day! We’re excited to get the word out about the elves… hopefully we can nab a trending topic on twitter soon

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!