We went through several incarnations of costumes for our merry St. Patrick’s drinking song. From kilts to jackets to vests, check them all out, recently added to our behind the scenes Facebook album!
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On Set for Beer! Beer! BEER!
Can’t get enough Beer! Beer! BEER!? We usually can’t. Dig deeper into the creation of our St. Paddy’s short with a new Facebook photo album full of behind the scenes photos!
You’ll meet our performers, the same crew from our infamous Snowball Fight Starring You, including Terra Jole (CSI, Jackass 3D) well as brothers Adama and Aboulaye Kone. In addition to our Facebook album, you can see them in action in the bonus video below and learn more about Terra at her website www.TerraJole.com!
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Beer! Beer! BEER!’s Alcoholic Animatic
Once we had our music track locked, we set out to create a Starring You video with equal amounts of energy and … drinking! Five person Starring You videos are our most requested, so we began with 5 leprechaun characters and came up this animatic, which scripted most of the movement for Beer! Beer! BEER!
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The Music Behind Beer! Beer! BEER!
So where did we get that catchy Irish drinking song for out St. Patrick’s Day Starring You spectacular… Beer! Beer! BEER!? Scrounging around iTunes for the perfect St. Paddy’s tune, we stumbled upon a recording of Beer, Beer, Beer recorded by The Malarkey Brothers, a band of four siblings that play some mean Celtic music.
We contacted the group in hopes of using their track and were lucky enough to acquire a version of the song with the vocals and instruments separate. A little pitch shifting and we had a track fit for the finest leprechaun. Click below to hear the various versions of the song after tweaking speeds!
Now for the important question… when and where can you see these guys live? If you’re lucky enough to live in Pennsylvania, you can catch them at multiple locations this St. Patrick’s Day. Click here to get more information at their website where you’ll also find plenty of links to download their music, a fine supplement to anyone’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the full version of Beer, Beer, Beer!
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Here Comes The… You
Boom. And just like that, new profile pic. This one goes out to all you brides-to-be out there. Same goes for you always-the-bride’s-maid-never-the-bride types that want a taste of what it’s like to go to gown town.
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With Apologies to Charlie Sheen
Our new St. Patrick’s Day video Beer! Beer! BEER! is going strong, with 750,000 views in the last two days! We’re excited to see how many people get into the Irish spirit as St. Paddy’s Day approaches. Meanwhile, we put this up on YouTube, because we can’t help ourselves.
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Cowboy Up and Bottoms Up… New Birthday eCard!
We’ve just posted our first widescreen Starring You birthday card, of many to come! Cowboy Kiss Your Behind is a collaboration between JibJab’s animators, songwriter Steffon Moody and character designer Stephen Barron. As with all of our birthday cards, it’s a Member exclusive, so Members, get making!
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New St. Patrick’s Day Videos Have Launched!
Newbies to JibJab, learn about the legend of Charlie Mopps, inventor of beer, with our free musical eCard set to the classic drinking tune “Beer, Beer, Beer”. JibJab Members, your subscription gets you an all-you-can-drink ticket to creating anything from our newly launched 2011 St. Patrick’s Day collection, where you can find out how to one-up those “Kiss Me I’m Irish” pins and enjoy our newly widescreen-ified Starring You videos.
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Record Breaking Bieber Video!
Justin Bieber’s JibJab video just set the record for most Starring You vids created in a week! With over 400,000 made and several million viewed, we knew there had to be some pretty good stories out there from the folks using the technology. When we asked our “like”rs on Facebook who they cast beside the Biebs, the replies covered the spectrum…
Tiffany: my sister
Nancy: My daughter and my niece
April: my 4 year old grandaughter who knows ALL his songs, she is sooo in love with him LOL!! She giggled so much when she saw the video, at first she couldnt even look at the video, she was too embarrassed
Allisen: My boyfriend!
Sam: One of my co-workers…
James: my poodleAwesome. Click here to check out the press release issued this morning, confirming further awesomeness.
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Throwback 2: Charleston Starring You
Since we’ve relaunched several of our dances to be widescreen and include thematic hats/hair, we’re going back and uncovering some behind the scenes materials from our first batch of Starring You dance videos back in 2007. Today’s subject is The Charleston, available in Facebook album form right over here. You’ll marvel that our black and white dance started with so much color and be surprised that it was almost a three person Starring You dance.
Once you’ve studied up on ancient JibJab history, click over here and cast our newly 16×9, fedora-adorned version of the dance. It’s even more the bees-knees than last time!
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Throwback to 2007: Disco Starring You
While we prepare to launch our new St. Patrick’s piece, we’ve got a little time to go through pictures and videos taken behind the scenes from before this blog was active. Disco was one of our first Starring You videos, shot some four years ago. Since then it remains one of our most popular videos, racking up over 46 million views total.
We’ve posted a Facebook photo album of our shoot from May 2007 right here and cast yourself in our retro vid here, now remastered to be widescreen and with wigs for the first time!
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JibJab Code on GitHub
Want some sweet, sweet open source code from the folks at JibJab? Visit our new page at GitHub and you can grab any code we make available to the public. Our first contribution is source code to create your very own Kudobot, a system we’ve had internally for about a year and a half that allows you to write and send accolades to coworkers and share them with your whole team. It’s been tremendously useful as a tool to keep us up to date on what milestones are being reached on a daily basis.
The source code can be found at: http://github.com/jibjab/Kudobot. Enjoy!
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The New JibJab Intro Vid!
So what exactly is this JibJab? Where did it come from and what do they do there? We’ve tried to make that answer much clearer with our new Welcome to JibJab video! Click it out below.
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The Samba Story
Our latest dance has been in the works for a long, long time. We shot the Samba in December 09 and it has been on our to-do list throughout the last year (and change!). To make it an authentic Brazilian dance experience, we brought in the pros, Kimberly Miguel Mullen and Emeka Simmons.
Kimberly, who earned her masters in dance at UCLA, teaches several dance classes in the Venice area, has her own series of Brazilian dance fitness DVDs and has performed all over the world. Emeka too has performed worldwide, in depth across Central America and Brazil, studying and performing with two Brazilian dance companies, Viver Brazil in 2003 and Ballet Folkloricodo Brazil in 2004.
Our final, short video displays a fraction of the skills they have, make sure to check out the behind the scenes photo album on our Facebook page for more pics and information, and visit Kimberly’s website to get the low down on her! Heck, buy a few of those DVDs of hers and maybe you can look as awesome as she does.
Then again, you can get her look instantly via Starring You, the Samba dance is available as a Valentine here or as an Everyday Fun dance here.
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You Want Wallpaper, Babe?
The response we got after posting our Facebook photo album full of I Got You, Babe art was fantastic, so to you we present high-res versions of our backgrounds, for you to make as your desktop background! Just click any image to reveal a much larger version, drag/save that to your desktop and do your thing.
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