Stick Your Face In It!
Our new Action Dad postable, very clearly inspired by our love for GI Joe action figures, has a few fun accessories that you might have missed. Here they are all blown up.
While our postables remain a standard size for sharing online, we use super hi-res versions for the mugs and cards in our gift store, where you can really appreciate all the little details. We’re working on offering more merch soon!
Our new Fatherly Food Pyramid postable is pretty extreme. But it used to be even more so.
Have you seen Kung Fu Dad yet? If you haven’t, you owe it a watch. The goal was to make a companion piece to Mother’s Day’s One Bad Mutha and this time around we found even better fighting footage to apply to the Father’s Day version of the card. It’s hard making fight scenes from 40 years ago work with Starring You heads, so Andy had to sift through hours of footage to find clips that would work. We ended up using three super old 70’s kung fu flicks to make this gem, each with titles more awesome than the next: “Shaolin Deadly Kicks”,”Chase Step by Step” and of course “Infernal Street”.
Father’s Day is looming this weekend and we’ve reacted accordingly by updating our library of eCards with new stills and videos galore. Among the coolest new cards we’ve debuted this week is Dad Rap, a poppin tribute to pop that puts the ‘hood’ back in ‘fatherhood’. Fun fact: that bling? It’s wooden. Hey, it’s not like we’re made of money!
We knew we wanted to do something big to coincide with World Cup fever, especially for our awesome throng of international fans. Little did we know just how popular a Starring You soccer scrimmage would be! In just two days, over half a million people found our fun football short, thanks in part to an obscene number of fans posting tweets, Facebook shares and oh yeah… those helpful Mashable/Techcrunch features.
And to think it all started on a hot sunny day spent in a dusty drainage basin. Check out our Facebook for pics from 7 hours in the sunshine well spent!
We’re wrapping our series on commitment with Anniversary Animals, our most recent piece and what we hope will be a popular Starring You for couples celebrating years together.
This little ditty was written, composed and sang by Steffon Moody, who is Evan’s brother-in-law. Here’s a link to his website! Romney then illustrated this card for it’s amazing look. Click the image below to enlarge and don’t forget to also check out our Facebook album for more art!
As if that wasn’t enough, don’t forget to check out our other recent additions to the Wedding category: Penguin Wedding, which will prove that having cold feet is a-ok, and Cake Maker, a look into just how those fancy wedding cakes get made.
Real Vows and Marriage is Scary are yet two more awesome addition to our most committed category, Weddings & Engagement. Written in house by our writers last year, both pieces were produced by the getting-more-insanely-popular-by-the-day Dane Boe. For these shorts we got a real couple, Sarah and Matt Pittenger, who were just weeks away from their actual wedding day! The shoot was slightly awkward for them, heeeelarious for us. Check out both shorts in the links above!
We’re continuing to look at some of the new content we’ve recently cooked up for our Wedding and Anniversary categories, this time with a wedding Sendable by the name of Mate for Life!
We released Mate For Life amist Mother’s Day and Star Wars madness and now we’re finally giving it some of the recognition it deserves, being one of the most beautiful peices we’ve ever produced.
It all started with a little song by Steffon Moody, Evan’s brother-in-law. Alan then took the track and designed, illustrated and animated the entire thing! Alan seriously wowed us all with his work on this card. You can check out his personal blog for super awesome high-res versions of all the sketches and backgrounds and click this link to see the final eCard in motion!
We’ve been on a streak for the last few months, working to bring more unique animations and videos to our site’s Wedding and Anniversary categories. This week, we’ll look at some of the pieces we’ve put up with some behind the scenes info as accompaniment!
First up is Octopus Anniversary. The idea was originated in studio with the animatic below, created by Jeff.
Next we threw it to long time JibJab collaborator Scott MacDonald, who has done stills and character design for us more than a few times in the past. He gave the octopus the glossy sheen you see now, which we then took back to our studio for Kevin to animate. You can view the final anniversary eCard here.
JibJab’s Wagon Wednesdays have become so infamous that we were recently approached by our friends at Yucatan Guacamole with interest in having our wagon sponsored! The words “free guacamole” were too powerful to resist and today we had a party complete with mustaches, chips and music provided by the group. We even live streamed it on Justin.TV.
Get your office to like them on Facebook and you’ll have a pretty good shot at winning a similar office party yourself! Just think of the avocado hummus dips…
Amy passes out the mandatory mustaches.
Here’s a first for us… as Andy, our Director of Development, enjoyed a Dodger game this weekend, he was surprised to find himself treated to our Star Wars Starring You on one of the biggest screens you can find! Evan writes “It looks like a giant iphone being lowered on strings from a hole in the sky by GOD.”
We recently put together a birthday card that drew upon our love for old school video games. Figuring out exactly how to present it went through several phases. In our first incarnation, Jeff pitched an awesome animatic where the gag was a little more twisted than the final product.
The next step was taking our Starring you technology and applying it to the game. It looked odd to split a head into three quarters with a triangle wedge. Similarly, just having the precut jaw open and close proved not big enough or centered enough to swallow a big pixel.
Kevin took to designing different kinds of power ups and enemies for our 8-bit head to eat and chase.
Once it all came together, we had a simultaneously retro and cutting edge birthday card on our hands! Check it out here!
This clip is from the making of Easter Egg Chorus, from our 2009 Easter content push. We could have just released the unanimated version, huh?
We passed around a google doc for organizational purposes while tackling the massive project of turning three films worth of footage into a ‘Starring You’ movie. As you can see, it’s pretty intense and colorful, but it does wonders with keeping the project organized, tracked and looping in everyone involved. This doc for “Return of the Jedi” keeps track of how difficult the animation in the scene will be, what frame we’re working with, the scene’s status of completion and it’s assigned artist.
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