Once we are feeling pretty good about where the script stands, we’ll start doing little drawings to help visualize the ideas.  We call these drawings ‘thumbnails’ because in the old days of animation that’s how big they drew them – the size of your thumbnail!  These drawings are not meant to be pretty, their sole…

Once again we had the privilege and pleasure of working with our good friend John Frizzle on the music track.  John is an insanely talented film composer and no matter what style track or genre of music we come at him with he is always able to turn it out! John’s credits include the scores…

For the first week or two of the projects the Art team was given the script and the freedom to do whatever they wanted. If they wanted to design characters, great. If they wanted to do storyboards, great. We did not even begin this project wed to the idea using puppets. Our main object was…

Making sure the lead characters were funny was one of the most important challenges the Art team faced. If we could make Obama and Biden funny then everything else would snap into place. In fact, the song was originally just Obama’s with an occasional throw to Biden but when Romney turned out some ‘buddy’ drawings…

An animatic is where we take the visual gags and ideas and start to lay them out into a timeline so we can see how they look and feel with the song.  As you can see from these samples, they are certainly not created to be pretty!  Mostly, animatics simply serve as guides for the…

One thing we pride ourselves on at JibJab is working with the absolute best of the best of the best.  Whether it’s an artist, musician, engineer or business person, we feel incredibly lucky to be able to work with GREAT people!  That’s why when we made the decision to go with puppets we immediately reached…

One of the hardest parts about producing a short film is having to scrap work that you absolutely LOVE because it doesn’t make the overall piece better.  There are always a handful of gems that get shut out for one reason or another and in this short we had to remove four puppets that Alex…

About halfway through the project we were all in the studio building puppets and Justin said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if the spinning JibJab logo were done with puppets?” It was such a simple but brilliant idea I think the rest of us were kicking ourselves that we didn’t up with it! It got tacked…

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do as much of this video as possible ‘in-camera’ .  This means that instead of using the computer to piece together all of the assets (puppets, sky, clouds, rainbow, etc.) we would film as much of it as we could.  For the opening shot we painted…

When we came up with the gag of having them fall through the rainbow of ‘Hope’ we didn’t think of how difficult it would be to paint and cut out all those letters and shapes! When it came time to insert the puppets into the scene we knew the big puppets would look too fake…

There were two key components to this shot. First, there is almost nothing funnier than a puppet getting tossed around like a rag doll. Especially when it bounces on his head… Over Halloween we had run a contest to see which JibJab fans could put together the mightest mustachioed JibJab guys photo. 10 lucky winners…

We were super excited about this shot, as it proved to be the only bit of stop-motion animation that we worked into the whole piece. Ian carved this set out of green floral foam, then animated it frame-by-frame using pins to keep it all in place. The program he is using called Dragon and it…

We thought this scene would be a breeze but it actually turned out to be quite a challenge. First, the balloons kept popping every time we would draw or paint on them. Then, when we finally got the balloon painted and blown up, we had a hard time popping it! Thank goodness for blow guns……

We just love thrown’ money around! We collected a big old stack of ones and fives, pinned a few to Obama’s hands then the puppeteers got to have a party… The second part of this shot was equally as cool. In keeping with the whole ‘in-camera’ theme we had Alex build a miniature version of…

This scene proved way more complicated to shoot than we initially expected.  First, Mike had to build two puppets; one that looked uncomfortable and could actually swallow the Healthcare pill and the second that looked really pissed off and could spring up to shout ‘REPEAL!’ Getting the Obama puppet to actually hold the pill and…