Every time we make a new video we wind up having to cast dozens of secondary characters so we almost always turn to our friends and family members first.  There are a handful of familiar cameos in this video along with a few new faces.  For our Jew and Arab we called on Mike and Josh Jaffe to reprise their roles from our video “Second Term”.  Gregg and Mike have been best friends since the second grade so we can always count on him to make goofy faces for us.  Here they are in “Second Term” along side the new one…

Another friend that we called on mid production was Jarl Mohn.  We posted about Jarl’s contribution earlier and the magic of Facebook, as we scoured our friends list for someone with the perfect look to play the general.

When Obama dumps the Federal Reserve building we tried to have everyone that works at JibJab get swept away by the currents.  The scene goes by in the blink of an eye but here’s some of the photos we shot of the team to work into the scene…

And of course no post about extra characters would be complete without PIRATES!  This was one of the most fun shoots we’ve ever had.  I mean, who doesn’t dream of coming to work in the morning and hearing “Hey, let’s dress up like pirates today”?  For all of the body assets Devin and Evan put on a few costumes and shot TONS of photos.  We actually thought about making a second “Behind the Scenes” blog called “Devin Bell is a bad-ass pirate”!  Check ’em out…

For the pirate faces we took the scraggliest guys hanging around the studio, asked them to put on bandannas and hats and just look MEAN!

And last but not least no post about photographing pirates would be complete without a mention of their trusty ship!  We knew we wanted the boat to have an air of authenticity but the pirate fight montage is pretty long and we did not want to have to build all of those assets from scratch for each shot.  That’s when our good friend Google came into play.  We simply typed in “pirate ship model” and you’d be amazed at what came up.  We couldn’t afford to buy any of the higher end models (as much as we wanted to) so we reached out to a seller that was in Southern California and asked if we could come down to just take some pictures for a fraction of the cost.  Victor was nice enough to meet us at his public storage space in Laguna early one Saturday morning and we popped off a ton of photos.  If you’re looking for a GREAT model ship Modelshipmaster.com is the place to go!  We shot the “Queen Anne’s Revenge”…