Stick Your Face In It!
It’s no secret how we got our witch to levitate in our Halloween Rap (black magic) but we thought it would be fun everyone to see our witch before and after our team worked their blue screen voodoo.
Special shout out to Adrienne Spiridellis for her bewitching moves.
The Monster Rap called for us to mimic both the angles and styles of your basic hip hop music video, so the first step in nailing the look was nabbing a wide angle lens for that fish-eye effect.
Here’s he look in motion. Of note, we are trying extremely hard to avoid that easy wrap/rap pun right now. It’s not even funny.
When you’re filming music videos like the Monster Rap, you’ve got to use what you’ve got to get the right angles and movement. And sometimes all you’ve got is an office chair and an extra able body.
Quit laughing, it works!
Liquids are notoriously some of the hardest moving things to animate, so when it came to creating a bubbling witch’s cauldron for the Monster Rap, a real brew was the thing to do. Our solution? Ian took the project to the kitchen and brought some tomato soup to a boil.
And here is the bubbly stuff in the final video. All characters are sans heads (to make it even spookier).
As we are oft to do when we’ve got a bunch of neat backgrounds to show off, here are a select few in wallpaper form. Click any of the photos here and on page 2, right click and set as your desktop background! Check out the rest of our art on our new Facebook album for this year’s Halloween behind the scenes.
With our library so stocked full of Halloween goodness, it’s easy to miss one of our new animated cards this year. “Booze on the Mind” features a spooky style, a diabolical doctor and a monstrous martini. Feast your eyes on some of the gorgeous art from the piece below, and send it by clicking here!
And now for a bonus character that didn’t make the cut for our Monster Rap. We were originally going to go with a werewolf for the DJ spot, but decided to opt for the Bride to get more ladies in the mix. Shame though, especially because his jersey was equal parts gangsta and Teen Wolf!
Hey, did you enjoy starring in The Empire Strikes Back and the rest of the original Star Wars trilogy? Share that enjoyment and nominate us for the Mashable Awards’ Most Creative Social Media Campaign!
Just click any of the buttons or links here and log into your Facebook or Twitter account on Mashable’s nomination site. You’ll see the option to vote for JibJab after you’ve signed in. Also feel free to drop our name into the mix for Best Website User Experience, you know, if you really love JibJab. No pressure.
Thanks!
Introducing our Halloween photo challege! Post a picture to our Facebook wall of you looking like a JibJab guy (the stash is key) and win any number of prizes from a year long membership, a lifetime membership or a cameo in our 2010 Year in Review! Full details below!
We make major updates to the site’s code about once a month and yesterday’s Halloween release was a doozy. First off, we’ve overhauled our video player to deliver you the first widescreen, 16×9 Starring You videos on our site! Almost every video we produce from here on out will be 16×9. We will also be retrofitting some of our classic dances and movies to their true 16×9 format, giving you an even more spectacular JibJab experience, starting with the Monster Mash!
We’ve updated how sharing works as well adding Facebook “like” buttons on your finished videos and the ability to share your JibJab creations instantly on Twitter!
Along with some typo fixes, new color backgrounds for holidays, decreased page loading time, headcutting process tweaks and thumbnail image repair, we’ve got our most stylish and functional site ever going into the big holiday season!
Today is the last rapper reveal until tomorrow’s launch of the Monster Rap! We wanted more ladies in the mix, and the Witch was a perfect addition to the gang, as played by the lovely and talented Adrienne Spiridellis.
And that’s the line up! Tune in tomorrow when we launch this blood sucker and let us know what you think!
Today’s rapper reveal is the most obvious of them all, considering you can’t have the Bride of Frankenstein without the big green guy himself. Us JibJabbers have a certain affinity for Franky, we’ve had him Monster Mash, dole out advice and gave him his own Presidential campaign ad a few years back.
We did some extensive character design, then costumed our monsters in real life to film them live. The mix of live action and animation results in very fluid, snappy rapping style that we think you’re gonna dig it. Two more monsters to go.
Continuing to put a contemporary spin on Halloween’s most classic monsters, we present DJ Bride O’ Stein, the record spinning disc jockey of our upcoming Halloween Rap.
We built her a graveyard complete with tombstone amps and cold slabs of concrete to remix upon. Together with the Mummy, they are two of five hip hop Halloween characters in our rap due next week!
Last year we brought you the JibJab version of Monster Mash. This year we’re taking things a more modern route with a project we’ve been brewing for months… the Halloween Rap. Leading up to it’s release, we’ll be taking a look at the characters you’ll be rapping as, starting with the original wrapper himself, The Mummy!
We’ve got about a week until the rap hits. Hold onto your sarcophagus!
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