The JibJab Blog

When we got the rights to use the classic Ronetts music track “Sleigh Ride” for the holiday season, we wanted to do something really amazing to fit in line with it.  Wanting to offer an adventurous sleigh ride through several locations called for miniatures and lead us to a magical winter world of ice cream and cozy felt characters.

We used real baked goods to build the video, most of which were eaten soon after they were photographed.  Check out our footage captures of spinning cakes and piles of whipped cream below, along with some bonus footage testing an idea to make the man in the moon a live-action face.

We highlighted some amazing behind the scenes time lapse videos from animator Max Winston last week.  Now get a closer look at the incredible puppets he created for Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town in our Facebook photo album!

Jeff rocked this project, first planning out drawing and drawing the animatic below, then doing all the dancing.  Zowee!

Warning, this will either ruin Feliz Navidad for you, or make it ten times better.

Then the team got hard to work and we pulled together to create some amazing art and a sharp render of the whole she-bang.  See detailed pictures at our Facebook album!

Thanks for checking out the behind the scenes section of  our 2010 Year in Review!  There’s always soooo much work that goes in to producing a two minute short so it’s always fun for us to shine a light on some of the efforts and processes that would otherwise go unnoticed.  Here you’ll find videos, pictures, stories and sounds which will tell the story of our creation process. Dive on in!

In July at JibJab, we are 100% focused on Christmas. In August, it’s time for Year in Review. Clearly a lot will happen between August and December 31, so we start with three simple goals. First, identify a tune that will be well suited for a “list song” (a song whose lyrics will be comprised of a fast moving list of events). Second, compile a list of the events that have happened so far so we have some material to play with. Third, find the “hook”.

This year we went through a list of about twenty songs. One of them, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”, really jumped out. “That’s Obama!” What better metaphor for the fresh, young President playing high stakes geopolitical games than a man flying through the air, hoping he can grab onto the next ring, and suffering devastating consequences if he misses.

We were energized by the idea of meshing the Year in Review with a political voice, something we hadn’t done since 2005. With a list of events from the year, the song melody and lead character in mind, we set out to find “the hook”.

The hook is the elusive few words that will be so catchy and memorable that it fuses into people’s brains and has them singing it for days, weeks, or years to come. This year’s hook, “So Long to Ya, 2010” came pretty quickly. It just felt like how our caricature of Obama would say goodbye to a year that didn’t treat him very well. While it’s not overtly rude (e.g., @#$% you, 2010), under the surface, in the way he sings it, you know the year can’t be over fast enough for him!

With the hook in the bag, the month of September and October are spent playing with lyrics. We like to have a 90% lock on lyrics by mid- October so we can hit the ground running in November when the team rolls off of the Christmas productions. This year, in mid-October, we were plagued with a sinking feeling that Obama, by himself, was having a hard time carrying the song. That’s when we came up with the idea of turning it into a duet, adding a foul-mouthed Joe Biden as Obama’s sidekick. It made us laugh and it opened up a whole universe of new gags.

With a ‘Year in Review’ there is always the uncertainty about what is going to happen between the time you write it and the time it is produced and released. Until the very end, when we have the voice actors in the booth, we are ripping out lines of lyrics, adding new lines, and tweaking the lines we have to better fit the stories. For example, prior to the mid-term, we knew the Dems would get an ass whopping, so we wrote the line “Yeah, you pummeled us good in the mid-term”. The real-Obama gave puppet-Obama a much better line “You shellacked us real good in the mid-terms”.

Even after the lyrics are recorded and there is nothing we can do to change what the characters sing, there is always the chance to get in last minute visual gags. For example, in late November, when Obama took a basketball to the face, we couldn’t get the vocalists back in the booth, but we could have a basketball fly onto the screen at the end and knock Obama off his perch! Good times.

Writing year in review videos is a unique challenge, but nothing compared to the heavy lifting of visual production that is yet to come…

We’ve had so many requests to get the full lyrics all written out, so here they are for your reading pleasure!

SO LONG TO YA, 2010

Sung to the tune of “Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”

We arrived in ’09 on a rainbow of hope,
But two thousand ten blew it all up in smoke.
From Tea Party rallies,
To banks going broke,
So long to ya two thousand ten!

You brought no jobs despite all my spending!
We passed health care, they shouted, “Repeal!”

So old Joe went on national TV, and said,
“IT’S A REAL BIG [BEEP]’IN DEAL!”

Earthquakes, volcanoes,
Bond bailouts in Greece,
That well from BP gushed for 12 [beep]in’ weeks!

From Mosques at Ground Zero,
To damn Wikileaks,
So long to ya, two thousand ten.

I passed finance reform, placed a justice,
Yet, my ratings they plunged through the floor.
I got Rangel, McChrystal and Karzai,
And no credit for “ending” a war!

Don’t ask, Don’t Tell,
Palin, Beck, Jihad Jane,
Michelle taking [beep] ‘cuz she whizzed off to Spain!
Oh, two thousand ten, we can’t wait for you,
To jet like that guy from Jet Blue!

They shellacked us real good in the mid-terms.
We were so sad when Rahm said “Goodbye”
Russian spies, Times Square bombs, Immigration,
Cal-ee-fornia just wants to get high!

Inherited wars, and mountains of debt,
Gridlocked politicians and nuclear threats,
As President that seems to be what you get,
That’s why I want one-
He only wants one-
Just give me a damn cigarette!

So long to two thousand ten!

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 purpose is to allow the artists to explore all the possible of ways communicating an idea without investing a lot of time.  Once we pick the idea we want to pursue, we flesh it out later in the process…

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 such classics as Office Space and Beavis and Butt-head Do America (and more recently that creepy angel movie Legion!) Not only is John a gifted composer but the guy is just plain FUNNY which is right up our alley! Unfortunately this is the only picture we snapped on the day of the record. John is standing giving direction to the musicians and Freddie “The Fred-meister” Wiedmann is workin’ Logic like nobody’s business!!!

As for the voice talent, we were lucky enough to bring back the dynamic duo of Jim Meskimen and Gaberiel Mann! These two guys are a hoot when you get them in the booth together and provided all of the vocal’s for ‘Never a Year Like ’09’. Jim has been our go-to voice guy since ‘This Land‘ and we’re proud to say he’s had a role in every ‘tent pole’ production we’ve produced since. John introduced us to Gabe back in 2007 and we’ve been marveling at his vocal wizardry ever since! Gabe provided the singing voice for Obama in “Time for Some Campaignin’” and came back to be the lungs behind puppet Obama this year.

There is nothing more enjoyable for us during a production then sitting back and listing to all these guys work their magic. Seriously.

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 to just have some fun and see where it took us.

Here is a smattering of some of the art that got produced during week 1. You can see a lot of the team gravitated towards characters, a bunch of which like Angela Merkel and Nancy Pelosi didn’t even make it into the final video…

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 it got everyone really excited. Here are some of the drawings that inspired the final designs for the puppets as well as working pics of the puppets themselves…

For Biden, Justin’s drawings captured the goofiness we wanted to inject into the character but Dave injected a bit of Beavis which we thought was hysterical. When Evan made the puppet he tried to fuse the two ideas together with felt…

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 artists so we can decide what gags are working, how to lay out our shots and how to time our action.  Sometimes a gag that we LOVE will have to get cut because it just doesn’t fit into the flow of the shots that surround it.

Here is our very first animatic from Nov. 8.  You’ll notice we still had not recorded with our musicians or actors and the entire end had yet to be thought out, but a lot of the shots are fairly close to where we ultimately landed…

A mere 4 days later we had completed our audio track and fine tuned a bunch of the shots, but the ending was still a big gaping hole…

Once the majority of the video was in production we went back to figure out what we wanted to do with the ending.  Jeff created 3 or 4 possible versions and here is the pass that we set out to shoot…

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 out to the guys at Swazzle. We’ve worked with them in the past on some of our eCards and not only are they insanely talented, they are also really fun to hang out with!

Even though we had storyboarded and planned out the entire short before they came to the studio, we wanted to get a few rounds of pure improvisational acting so they had the freedom to bring their own bit of puppet magic to the short.  All three of these clips are them making it up as they go. Notice there are three guys operating each puppet.  It’s hard enough to two people to perform in sync but THREE???  Come on, guys!

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 spent about 2-3 weeks building!  We were convinced that Bush and Cheney would appear during the line ‘inherited wars’ and that Kim Jung Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would appear during ‘nuclear threats’ but once we saw the puppeteers perform their freestyle dance, there was no way we could NOT use that footage.  Alex’s sculptures were absolutely GORGEOUS, but dancing puppets were just plain funny.  When we broke the news to him he didn’t even bat an eye.  He simply said, “Hey, whatever works best for the short.”  So…  hat’s off to Alex and here are his almost completed puppets in all their glory…

A slightly easier scene to cut (but one we were still sad to leave) was NY governor candidate Jimmy ‘The Rent’s Too Damn High’ McMillan.  We were all fighting over who would get to build the Jimmy puppet but when Gregg dressed up as him for Halloween and no one knew who the heck he was Jimmy McMillian was no more…

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 onto the ‘If-There’s-Time’ list but there was no way Mike would let this project end without turning out these bad boys…

Once the logo puppets were built we wanted the JibJab text to be done by hand as well. Justin set to work hand painting the letters on a stick…

And the rest is history!