The JibJab Blog

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 a rainbow on foam core, cut it out and plunked it into a bunch of cotton.  Here’s the set in it’s completed form, a little tinier than you might imagine…

And here is a temp shot filmed with an iphone so we could see how it all looked ‘in camera’…

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 in there and that we would have to build mini-Obama/Bidens. Trish sewed up some sweet little characters but they proved to be too good so Evan and Kevin hot glued these little buggers together in about 3 minutes! Here’s the footage that ultimately got composited into the ‘O’ of Hope…

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 were picked from these entries to win a cameo in the Year in Review! We pondered pitting them in plane passenger seats, but found that the tea party mob was the best spot to pop their faces into. See, it pays off to be a JibJab fan!

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 allows us to scrub back and forth between frames before we take a picture so we can make sure it all lines up…

Here is what the final stop-motion footage looked like before we color corrected it and brought it into the film…

And if you have a closer look, every frame is like its own amazing abstract sculpture…

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…

The way we got the balloon to fill up with air at the front of the scene was by using the oldest trick int the book… play the footage in reverse! Here’s the footage of Ian clipping a really tiny hole in the base of the balloon so it would slowly deflate. Play that footage the other way and it’s movie magic!

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 the Oval Office!

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 jam it down the green guys throat in time with the music was where we had some issues. Being that the JibJab art team has not done puppet stuff before we did not really take the physics of the thing into account. Sure it all LOOKED nice but easy-to-operate was another story.

We finally decide to slow the audio down by 50%, act the scene out in slow motion then speed it up afterwards. Here’s a photo of the set up and a video clip of the guys acting it out in slow motion….

Once we got the whole pill-popping thing worked out, Mike set off to build the replacement puppet that would spring up and scream. Here’s some out-take footage of him and Justin operating the angry, little man…

Finally, as an extra bonus, here’s some of the original design work Justin created for Mike to build the character off of…

Joe Biden cursing on television is comedy gold! After the puppet was built Ian mocked up an old school TV that we could slide ol’ Joe into. Here’s some shots from the process…

We could not get enough puppet dancing. It’s just hilarious, you guys. You try capturing ridiculous footage of dancing puppets and cutting it out, it’s close to impossible.  So it is with great pride we give you MORE puppet dancing…

Here’s a clip of the guys workin’ the waves. Once the puppets were filmed, we just plugged them right into the raft…

We had done some early tests that relied much more heavily on compositing effects into the background. They came out beautifully but ultimately we felt like they were too slick for this project and we should stick with a much simpler look and feel. Here’s a pass that Kevin put together with a much more sophisticated lighting set up and animated, stop-motion painted cotton balls for smoke. (The ‘fishing pole’ is a place holder)…

This scene is super fast but we think it’s one of the funniest clips in the final video. It’s amazng how much effort can go into ONE second of screen time!

Here’s some shots of Romney sculpting the puppet…

Then there were the backgrounds to contend with! Here’s a sequence of Kevin doing the layouts, carving the foam core, then spray-painting them in his back alley…

And finally here’s some extra extended footage of Romney and Kevin filming their scene. It’s amazing how much personality can be infused into a lump of clay on a stick holding a toilet paper roll with a golden pumpkin on top!

When we wrote Wikileaks into the Year in Review, they were a fairly big story, but nowhere near the story they are now!

Here’s a shot of Kevin building the Pentagon…

And here’s what the final set looked like and a clip of the guys in action. One of the best parts about making this video was that everyone was there to help each other out. There was no real ‘plan’ to film this scene, but once Kevin completed the set up Romney, Ian, Mike and Alex just dropped what they were doing and picked up some puppet letters…

Ian had done some early storyboards trying to figure out all the different ways that Obama and Biden could physically destroy the year 2010. We had them pop the 2010 balloon early, on but when we saw them beating the 2010 with sticks… we just knew it had to be in the short. As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, puppets preforming acts of physical violence never fails to be funny…

We couldn’t make a full fledged puppet video without tipping our hats to Punch and Judy, so for the set we decided to place the duo in a TRUE puppet stage. Here’s some of Justin’s viz dev for the set that he ultimately built out of sparkly foam and ribbons…

And finally, we knew we needed a REAL curtain transition to close out the scene and get us to the Shakespearean lament so here’s Jeff and Ian whipping something together and filming it. This footage is what we used for both the red and blue curtain falls in the short…

The only thing better then goofy puppets are goofy puppets being dramatic! We were really psyched to build a Shakespearean Obama puppet. Here’s a detailed look at the costume and a shot of the Swazzle guys in action…

Building the giant Easter Island head inspired versions of Charles Rangel, General McChrystal and Hamid Karzai was a task we couldn’t wait to see Justin undertake. He had never sculpted before but his drawings are just magnificent and we knew he’d be able to turn these three out like no one else.

Here’s just a sampling of his work in process leading up to the completed sculpts…

After Justin completed the sculptures we spent a good amount of time testing different lighting set ups. Even though the final statues were grey we put cool and warm gels over the lights to get he different colors…

Finally, after the lighting was worked out it was time to film the actual characters. In the original storyboards for the shot they were going to be pulled out of frame and into the darkness. Once we got into production we realized it would be cleaner to just light up a scrim in front of them. Here’s the footage that got used in the final shot. Thank goodness for blue gels!