For those of you who missed it last night, NBC has posted Al’s performance of CNR live on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon… featuring JibJab’s music video! This won’t be available forever, so check it out. Click here or on the image below to watch it on Hulu.
Huzzah! We’ve been building up to this moment for months and now we’re happy to announce that JibJab pictures and videos have hit the Facebook Gift store, allowing the world to oh-so-easily post videos from our massive library to your friends Facebook walls on birthdays, holidays or whenever! You may have read about it last week in Wired or the New York Times, as Facebook rolled it out to small groups of their users at a time.
JibJab members will continue to get first word of new content as well as the ability to download and share via Facebook, while the Facebook option will be the best way to make one card or dance at a time using Facebook credits. In other words, JibJab.com is all you can eat, while Facebook will be one entrée at a time. Check Facebook’s FAQ and their blog for more information.
Tune into Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th and catch Weird Al Yankovic’s live performance of CNR! Its the first, or one of the first live performances of the song and we’re really excited to hear it, plus it doesn’t hurt that they’ll be playing the JibJab music video behind Al’s performance! Al is on air promoting his new album, The Essential Weird Al Yankovic, so don’t forget to pick that up as well!
We’ve shared a considerable amount of behind the scenes on this year’s projects, but having not had a full time blog running last year, now may be the perfect opportunity to show everyone how we put the infamous Zombie Party together. In this animatic/behind the scenes video, you’ll see that we had intricate undead hands and feet made up, employed gore galore and dragged our entire team into the mix to create the zaniest zombie bash ever created!
Don’t forget to see how it all turned out and put your head on a Zombie Party here!
We thought it was pretty awesome when self proclaimed news junkie Mike Bucc from Albany sent his favorite local TV news crew a Monster Mash starring the televised team… but wouldn’t you know it, they showed the video on the news that night and gave him a shout out! Double awesome! Since this cool happenstance, we’ve been scouring the net for local news crews and disc-jockeys that Mashed themselves. Many posted right to their Facebook fan pages… check it out!
105.3 KOOL FM, 107.1 FRANK FM, Good Morning Northwest, Sandbar Radio, KVST 99.7 FM, 101.5 WRAL FM, WPOR 101.9, NBC 25 news, Q104 Cleveland, The New Mix 106.3
We always get a kick out of how fans keep finding new ways to use JibJab Starring Yous. With Monster Mash this month, we’ve seen folks apply the technology into some new situations that were so awesome we had to share.
The Arizona Orthadontic Studio outside of Pheonix is running an all-orthadontist Monster Mash in their waiting room through this month.
Popular pop-rocker Hawk Nelson also used the mash to promote their new album.
We’re hearing about more Monster Mashes daily, including pet talk radio shows, college sports blogs and featuring the staff of Myrtle Beach’s O.D. Pavilion amusement park. Doing something original with your Monster Mash videos? Let us know and we’ll spread the word!
[UPDATE: The awesome staff at the Arizona Orthadontic Studio shot us a note and snapped us a photograph of their JibJabbing in action! Thanks guys!]
I am attaching a photo of our staff and myself (Dr Feldman) in our waiting room.
We normally show informational videos about orthodontics and dental care. BUT, when we found Jibjab, we created several videos of the staff ‘in action.’ Patients love watching their doctor and assistants rocking out in the Monster Mash. Perfect for the month of October.
Looking forward to more great work from Jibjab.
Blair Feldman DMD, MS
www.thesmilecreators.com
Take a look at the animatic from our Monster Mash video and you’ll see the skeleton behind the creation of a Starring You. Location concepts and character angles are decided right away and usually make it to the final cut, the dancing however is quite often left to interpretation. While the story remains the same, sometimes we snip out an idea or two, like those hot babes hanging out with Dracula. Sucks for him.
We’re so proud of the backgrounds our design team cooked up for the Monster Mash that we’re offering some of our favorites up at high resolution for you to use as your desktop wallpaper! Click the images below to nab a bigger version of them and right click to set as your desktop background. Some of these are concept art that didn’t make it into the mash, but they’re perfect for the spooky weeks ahead!
As Monster Mash soars over 7 million views, we continue to look behind the scenes. Its probably just as fun for us to act in Starring You videos as it is for our fans to cast their faces on the site. We’re lucky enough to have a staff full of goofballs who added quite a lot to the video, including booty shaking, finger waving and rump slapping. In particular, our Dracula had to have a great entrance, as he was the last character to show up in the Mash. We can credit Andy’s acting for the perfect cape reveal which we ended up using in the piece, even if he demands mocha lattes in between takes.
When launching a ton of new content all over the site like we did with Halloween, the responsibilities involved are massive. Every piece we launch goes through testing, tweaks, renders and troubleshooting with a whole team of people. That aside, one of the biggest tasks can be getting graphics and thumbnails together so we can feature content all over the site as well as our channels on other websites all over the net. Between newsletters, ads, logos, banners and thumbs, our design team has to create dozens of mini images that best convey what the video or category is all about. The process is nothing to thumb your nose at, so production team, we salute you! Here is a small taste of the array of images that went into Halloween’s launch this year.
Released in 2007 while the primaries were just heating up for the 2008 election, Night of the Living Republicans and Night of the Living Democrats were a mix of clips from Night of the Living Dead and some original footage we shot and animated.
Now that we know who won the election, we wanted to refresh the dated piece so a whole new group of people could have some fun fending off zombies this Halloween. The result “Night of the Living Dead’ish” is a zippy Starring You with some new gags, a twist ending and most importantly, a timeless feel. Try one out! Here’s Barack and Michelle cast as the leads.
RIP Night of the Living Democrats/Republicans. Youtube will always remember your glory.
Pssst. Got a free second? We’re hankering for a nomination at Mashable’s 3rd annual open web awards and you can help us out! Since early this summer, we’ve fully integrated Facebook Connect into our site, allowing people to grab photos from their friends’ Facebooks albums and easily post Starring You creations to any Facebook wall. With your help, maybe we can get a nomination in Mashable’s “Most Creative Use of Facebook Connect” category and let a whole mess of people know about the cool stuff we’re doing on the site. Click here to write us in, its a simple process that uses Facebook connect to sign you in (but we definitely use it more creatively, don’t you think?).
More Monster Mash fun-factoids! Shooting dozens of videos a year on our little green screen, we often use our small stash of props in as many ways as we can. JibJabbers with keen eyes will notice toy guns, beat up suits and other hand props making a few repeat appearances. When it came time to find a brain for the Monster Mash, we realized we had just the thing already lying around! Look familiar?
Send a belated birthday brain over here.
The response to our celebrity cast Monster Mash contest was overwhelming! Thanks to all who entered. In the end, we decided to award the top 10 mashes with free memberships! Here are 3 of our favorites (the rest can be viewed below).
The Monster View by Kate Bettis
Cereal Killer Mash by Randy Ford
Classic Monster Mash by Mark Walker
Other winners and favorites include the Always Sunny Mash, Celeb-baby Mash, Dancing with the Mash, Good Times Mash, Mixtape Mash, Monty Python Mash, Seinfeld Mash, Spider-Mash and Cat Mash for being ridiculous. Congrats to the winners, and we hope you had a little fun in the process!
JibJab is holding a contest! We want to see your best celebrity casting of the new Monster Mash video! Post your best 5 some of celebs to our facebook, @ our twitter or in this blog’s comments. This Monday the 12th we will announce our favorite cast and award a free year long membership!
Folks have already been using the Monster Mash to cast their favorite celebrities. Legions of faithful New Kids on the Block fans have been bombarding their favorite band with custom Monster Mashes featuring the famous 5-some.
And Collective Soul fans did the same, with Collective Soul taking notice!
Go wild, and may the best cast win!
