Lauren, our beyond incredible Production Director, sends out a ridiculously thorough email to the team when we launch new content. For our St. Patrick’s Day launch, things were no different. Here is a taste of what we see in our inboxes when new content becomes available.
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Behind the Irish Step
While we are gearing up to release lots of fun for St. Patrick’s Day next week, we wanted to go BACK IN TIME to revisit a ‘Starring You’ favorite… the Irish Step. Meet Jason Gorman, Meredith Lyons, Carol Coyne and sisters Elsa & Anna Johnson. Back in 2008, we found these dancers as part of an Irish Step group out of Long Beach. This was before our daily blog, so we never had the chance to properly give them face time and credit for their impressive moves. Of note, since we first filmed the dance over two years ago, Jason Gorman has stepped up to play the Lord in the famed Lord of the Dance! Just take a moment and let that sink in. You can put your face on a Lord of the Dance-worthy dancer. Awesome. Check out some raw footage from the shoot below and make sure to get your dance on this St. Patrick’s day by clicking here!
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JibJab on ESPN?
We’ve seen coverage from news sources of every type, but it’s all too rare that we make ESPN. Due to a heavy endorsement from Mike & Mike in the Morning (who are celebrating 10 years) and ESPN’s Page 2, we saw a big jump in the number of Figure Skating ‘Starring You’ vids made today! Thanks Mikes, for spreading the glory of competitive skating with the masses and congrats on 10 years! We know the feeling, having just celebrated our 10th birthday ourselves.
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Snuggie in the House
In the JibJab offices, temperatures are temperamental. It can be sweltering hot in here one day, freezing cold the next. While we’ve been moving fans around and eating frozen lemonade, Maureen has the right idea. She’s been boldly rocking the pink Snuggie at work all day as she renders videos out for us.
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Getting Conventional
In order to keep on the technical up-and-up, we are consistently splitting up and visiting as many conventions as possible. We follow animation very closely, as well as social networks, internet trends, interactive technology and anything having to do with taking, uploading, manipulating and storing photos. Today we’ve got a crew of four at the Photo Marketing Association International Convention, doing just that, as we saw the latest and greatest in photo and gift merchandise and technology.
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JibJab’s Toy Stash
Most of the people at JibJab have fun little toys on our desks. Some display ridiculous props from our videos, while others feature favorite cartoon characters and action figures. But nobody’s collection comes even close to Dave on our design team, whose love for all things anime and geek have resulted in a collection that would make ToyFare jealous. Behold the fabled Mighty Mugs, Transformers, Macross and Voltron robots of Dave’s desk!
Dave’s love for all things mech-warrior has shown on art he has created for the site. Here’s something you may have missed, check out the tip of the Capitol Building at the end of last year’s Leprechaun Bailout card. Look familiar?
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Ghostheads
You may have noticed the wide variety of grey, semi transparent question-mark heads that grace our site as we put up ‘Starring You’ content. “Who are these mysterious people?” you might ask. We call the question-mark faces “ghostheads” here at the JibJab offices, and they consist of current JibJab employees, past JibJab employees, friends, family members (especially wives), actors and models pulled from stock photography online. We’ve got a pool of faces for every age, race and gender which has been amassing for years. You should see how many baby heads we have. Ok, that just sounds weird.
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We’ve Got Mad Flow
Building an interactive website is tricky stuff, you’ve got to account for where people end up if they create an eCard, allow them to loop around back to the start, let them branch off into social networks or gift stores and account for if they are logged into the site, members or non-members, Facebook connect members… yeesh!
Sounds complicated right? That’s where our product manager Johan and his massive poster flow charts come in handy. With his help, we can track a user’s path through our site and help the experience seem intuitive and easy. We keep them up in the office as our closest thing to wallpaper. Check out the size of these beasts!
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The Thank You Button
We’ve recently added a new tool into our eCards that demands a little write up: now when you receive any JibJab eCard, you will see a button that prompts you to thank the person who sent a JibJab your way. We’ve made thanking easy, by creating a special category of all-free-eCards so members and non-members alike can throw a thank-you message back at their friends. Next time you receive a JibJab, look for the smiley button on the left and give a JibJab back!
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Valentine’s Day with the Ukulady!
Last year we had the pleasure of meeting Thessaly Lerner (alias: the UkuLady). With her syrupy sweet voice, tender ukulele strumming and completely insane lyrics, she made herself a hit on YouTube and beyond… thusly a collaboration was in order! She wrote us some particularly quirky songs for birthdays, graduation and anniversaries, and came down to the studio to record them, including the Valentine’s Day song “I Love You More Than“. Make sure to send her Valentine to some one this year, and check out her website for more wacky songs than you can shake a rainbow colored magic wand at!
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Let’s Get Physical, on Facebook
We were psyched to learn that the song “Let’s Get Physical” was just named Billboard’s SEXIEST SONG OF ALL TIME. Since we had such a great time working out to the song last month while filming our ‘Starring You’ version, we figured we should share a Facebook album full of our best behind the scenes photos. It’s like you’re there with us, but without the gross gym smell!
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The Bits and Pieces Behind Kama Sutra
When we set out to match the truly unique style of the Kama Sutra for a sultry Valentine’s Day card, the first step was to do our homework… which of course meant looking through the ancient Indian text over and over.
We poured through a variety of Kama Sutra books and images on the internet, noting the textures, symmetry, shapes and colors that give the instructional drawings their unmistakable look.
With a set of character and background design notes worked up, the time came for experimenting with colors and patterns, laying the ground work for our visual development. We worked up plenty of flat floors and a number of large objects to place in the middle of the scene in order to block certain unwanted visuals.
Character design occurs at this stage as well. With the Kama Sutra, there aren’t many opportunities to see our characters in clothes, so we had to get creative designing big head pieces and hair.
By the way, before you get any ideas, “FIST” stands for “Face In Symbol Technology”. We worked up a bunch of positions based on the initial pitch, with names like “The Hurry Curry”, “The Side Saddle Swami” and a few more that if we posted we’d have to wash out mouths out with soap. The key to finding the funny in the positions was fairly obvious. Legs. In several scenes you’ll notice a bunch of arms and legs that are completely uncounted for.
We were just about wrapped when it struck us that in our rush to get lots of Valentine’s Day stuff wrapped up, we had almost completely forgotten to design some head gear! In just a little over a day we designed up some interesting art to fit atop your Valentine’s head.
That’s a wrap! See how it all turned out by casting you and your Valentine in the Kama Sutra over on the site! -
JibJab’s Romeo & Juliet
The crown jewel from our stash of new Valentines has to be Romeo & Juliet. In order to tell the greatest love story ever told, we had to condense it down to a minute, like we did in 2009 with Jowls and Shoot Your Eye Out. Check out the journey the story made, what we cut out and compare to how it ended up, by starring as Romeo and Juliet in Romeo & Juliet!
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Reflecting Back on “Let’s Get Physical”
Shooting “Let’s Get Physical” at a gym was a ton of work for us, namely because of the mirrors. You know how gyms are, almost all weightlifting areas are completely surrounded by mirrored walls, making it an intense challenge to find good angles of our duo as they lifted without catching their reflections in one mirror or another, or the reflections of our crew. Still, even with our best attempts, some scenes required us to work a little magic and erase extraneous people from the final footage.
In the original video, that guy with the ladder moves through the background as the camera pans up. In order to erase a person behind that many layers of machinery with a camera in motion, Alan came up with the solution to photoshop a blank version of the mirrored wall and have it move in sync with the camera. It worked great, but he’ll admit… “that was kind of a nightmare”. Check out the seamless switch out when you cast yourself in the music video!
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Where we got “Let’s Make Out”
We’re pretty active when it comes to seeking out cool talented people to collaborate with, hunting down internet celebrities, taking hints from friends and browsing Youtube thoroughly. When Andy, our director of development stumbled across the YouTube video below, it pleaded to be transformed into a JibJab Sendable.
The makeouts were irresistible and prompted us to get right on the horn with the creator of the cartoon, Stephen Neary to chat him up about licensing. Wouldn’t you know it, he was in! We trimmed the song a little and now you can send it out as a valentine on our site! Sending this one really works two-fold, you support an awesome artist, and you may receive open mouthed kisses!
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