The more characters, the more pieces. The more pieces, the more complicated it is to produce! For this shot Kevin had to breakout the old school timing charts to figure out exactly how all those tiny assets should be moving… It’s a shame this scene goes by so fast in the final video. This Kim…

This clip is the very first animated test for when we begin making this project and trying to figure out ‘the look’. Ian produced this 100% in After Effects with the intention of having it LOOK handmade and he did a pretty darn good job! Ultimately we felt like this film should actually BE handmade…

From the moment we heard this line in the lyrics we knew we wanted to have a pervy, slightly disgusting tongue darting around inside a cut out mouth. Originally we were gonna animate a kaleidoscope of sexy woman circling his head but once we saw the results of a quick web cam test we realized…

We knew from the get go that we wanted to completely wreck a toy car for this shot. We tossed around the idea blowing it up with firecrackers but we ultimately settled on two items – A) a hammer and B) a toy car. And here’s the take that made it into the final piece…

This is another one of the first shots that we began working on. It was the ultimate combination of real sets, live-action puppetry and stop motion. Devin built the plane out of clay and filmed it on fishing wire. Evan built the NYC skyline with paper cut-outs. Ian designed and animated the waves on the…

There was LOTS of cotton used in the making of this video. For this scene, Devin set up multiple layers of glass so he could animate cotton floating by at different speeds to give the illusion of smoke.

Heading into this scene we had one thing in mind. We wanted to communicate pure recklessness! Originally we wanted to get some baby dolls and throw them across the room to a doctors open arms but even that didn’t feel careless enough. We decided on cut out legs to match the rest of the piece…

We had a lot of different ideas about how to show Obama getting ‘spurned’ by the Olympic committee but none of them really showcased the key element of the scene… He chased it pretty hard and really wanted to bring it home. Jeff came up with the gag of turning the red Olympic ring into…

OK. We know we’ve told this joke before but watching Michael Vick get attacked by a dog will never get old!

The idea behind this scene was to make it feel like those paper doll cut outs that little kids dress up. For the base character underneath the uniforms we imagined that once he left the Jets he sat around in his tighty whiteys drinking beer and watching TV. When the Vikings costume comes back, the…

When we were building assets we tended to grab whatever materials were closest at hand. In this case, the hallowed halls of Congress were built on the back of a case of Bud! And here’s a fun test shot taken with the iphone to see how it looks in camera…

Our friend Devin is a Master or materials! Who else would have grabbed a mini-Squash when asked to build Balloon Boy’s balloon? We also tried animating this scene with and without poor Falcon in there. Ultimately we felt like the ridiculous amount of press coverage Balloon Boy got was way funnier than the kid that…

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…

Here is just one of about 10,000 print sheets that we created for this project. Even though this was a mostly computer-less project we still designed and scaled a lot of what we produced in Photoshop then had to print big 13×19 sheets. Here is the economic shredder broken into all its elements and below…

We were slightly concerned about how to illustrate this line in the song and still keep it to a PG-13 rating but the character remains fully clothed and Jeff’s animation had us rolling on the floor!