Greetings JibJabbers! Every four years, my brother and I are blessed with a political circus so ripe with absurdity that ‘finding the funny’ becomes like shooting fish in a barrel. In 2000, we created the Bush/Gore rap battle. In 2004, we produced This Land. Now, in 2008, we’re pleased to present Time for Some Campaignin’!…

People always ask us how we make our JibJab videos. The release of our latest election video felt like a great opportunity to describe the process from soup to nuts! There is also a TON of writing, design, music and artwork created during the process that never sees the light of day. Now, thanks to…

We knew we wanted to produce a video for the 2008 election but we were terrified of the expectations for our follow up to THIS LAND. Unfortunately, when you are a tiny company, there is no time for fear; you just have to DO IT! Rather than try to “top” THIS LAND, which we knew…

Once an idea is in place we ask ourselves two questions: Does it make us laugh and do we love it enough to spend the coming weeks and months working around the clock on it? If the answer is yes to both then we start pounding away at it! Gregg will keep chipping away at…

Once the lyrics and initial visual concepts are fleshed the process opens up beyond the brothers. Evan works with the amazing internal and external artists at JibJab to start really fleshing outing the visual gags and storyboards. There are pages upon pages of drawing that get done at this stage. If you look closely some…

Once we start to feel comfortable with the lyrics, we will record a “scratch track”, which is an english term meaning “recording that will make your ears bleed because Evan and Gregg can’t sing”. We use the scratch track for two purposes. First, we pull it into the computer and lay out our visual gags…

Visual Development is where we create a bunch of art, not with the intention of actually putting it in the animation, but rather to get a sense for what the animation should FEEL like. Viz Dev begins at the very beginning of Pre-Production and continues to evolve throughout the making of the piece. Here’s some…

With the lyrics nailed down and the storyboards 80% of the way there, we get to do the most fun part of the process: recording! Recording is so great because, unlike animation which takes weeks or months, we start in the morning with nothing and, by the end of the day, we have a polished…

An “animatic” can be thought of as the skeleton for the final animation. It is the first stage of combining the music, lyrics and visuals so we can make sure the gags and cuts are working before we start the heavy lifting (and expensive) process of producing artwork. The animatics are the end product of…

Over the past few years we have focused a lot of energy on taking our character animation to the next level. Sometimes simple, herky-jerky animation it’s perfect for the joke we are telling – like it was in ‘This Land’. In ‘This Land’ we used the same marching dance over and over and over again.…

We are obsessed with background art! In the eight and a half years since we started JibJab we have never produced a piece that is so chock full of amazing art! Our philosophy has always been to “love every pixel of every frame!” but our art team took it to a whole new level on…

Now that we have outlined all the individual steps, we thought it would be fun to break down the last scene of the video to show you how it’s all connected. This is (literally) the money shot! The very first task in visual development was figuring out exactly what the voting booth should feel like.…

We love making funny videos but life would be boring if we weren’t constantly trying to innovate and do new things. Back in August 2007 we launched Starring You!® which allows the viewer to put themselves INTO our videos. Since then our audience has created more than 12 million heads (which is more than the…

If you’ve made it through all the ‘Behind the Scenes’ posts thanks for reading! Hopefully we helped shed some light on how JibJab’s animated projects come to life. More importantly, if you are reading this blog we are guessing that you’re a fan and we want to thank you again for watching and sharing our…