So we fully recognized that this is the exact same shot we used in “This Land” but we figured 1) why mess with a good thing and 2) this could be our last opportunity to squeeze ‘Governor’ Schwarzenegger into a JibJab video. We love Arnold and will be sad to see him reach the end of his term limit.

Here’s how the character assets came together and below that is Kevin animating away on the down shooter. If you look at the top of the photo you can see the camera mounted to a pole and pointing down at the character – hence the name “down-shooter”!

And once the character was animated we had to composite him into a background. For this we built a tiered set of the Hollywood hills so we could animate tissue paper flames behind each row. The original goal was to get the stop-motion flames filmed and then go back, cover the set in rubber cement and actually set it ablaze but 1) we were happy with how the tissue paper flames came out and 2) we just plain ran out of time. Oh well. Maybe we’ll get to light something on fire for our next production!