We’ve got a few new Starring You videos hitting the site next week and this is your first peek at one we’re super excited about unleashing upon the world. Wait’ll you see how we pulled off putting your head onto spinning skaters…
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The Elves Are Packing It Up
On January 18th, the elves of ElfYourself will be headed back to the North Pole, not to return until the next holiday season. With ElfYourself.com going offline, this also means that your ElfYourself creations will be lost, unless downloaded to your desktop. If you need instructions on downloading ElfYourself movies to save forever, check out our FAQ over here.
Some people have expressed worry that JibJab.com is going offline. This is not the case! In fact we’ve got a big launch coming up next week. But as for the elves, you’ll have to say goodbye until their time comes again. We’ll miss the pointy eared buggers!
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YouTubin’
We’ve been having a little fun on YouTube this week, freshly skinning our page design over there and adding boat loads of fan made videos to our featured section. We’re estimating that over 30 JibJab created videos hit YouTube every day thanks to our fans!
Browsing through the massive assortment of JibJab inspired videos shared with the world, some really stick out. Here are some odd ones that caught our eye this week.
First off, we were lucky enough to have an international fan in the community who is so awesome, they translated our video into Portuguese!
We stumbled upon a video that had this description “Jib and Jab comb their mustaches and polish their shoes as they leave JibJab.com to travel the world and have some fun!” Brace yourselves for weird.
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Meet Me In “This Land”
Our central meeting room is nick named “This Land”, for reasons we shouldn’t have to explain if you’re reading this blog. It must see at least four or five meetings a day, be it tech brain storming, laying out the calendar for the months ahead or going over scripts with tweaks. Mostly though, it sees a lot of munching on Red Vines, which are kept stocked as a centerpiece at all times. We browse the site and look at pitches by throwing them up on the glowing TV. Here Andy discusses a script he wrote for some Valentine’s day stuff in production right now. Usually Gregg and Evan weigh in, offer feedback and after a few sessions scripts are approved and onto production!
It’s dark in there, so forgive the blurry iPhone shot.
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The Hand Library
Not everyone may know that many of the artists and programmers at JibJab also work for us as models. Sounds glitzy, right? Our good looks are undeniable. We often nab people while they’re working at their desks for a quick photoshoot to fill out the assets we need for animating, and one of the biggest needs we have is for hand images. We try to keep a stockpile of hand poses that can suit any activity we want to convey, and the human hand sure can take on many shapes and forms.
Our modeling sessions have hands pressing up against objects, wrapped around tools and photographed from every angle until we have hundreds of variations. Good reasoning to keep our nails properly manicured!
Amanda from our animation team deserves a hand for all of the modeling done above. Check out some of our hands in use over in the freshly updated Profile Pics area!
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Even more “Never a Year” pics!
Even with our massive behind the scenes blog, there are still a bunch of cool shots we wanted to share with you guys. Check out our Facebook album full of leftovers, just make sure to press “like” on every image.
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Never a Year Press!
We were lucky enough to get the Year in Review picked up by many-a-major news source over the last week! Here are some of our favorites, including a TechCrunch article, some color commentary from ABC News, NewTeeVee write up, a Reuters review and our feature on CNN!
Pretty awesome stuff. Also be sure to check out MSNBC’s interview with Gregg below!
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2009 – Welcome to ‘Behind the Scenes’
You wouldn’t think that making funny little short films could be stressful business but believe us, it can be. Since July the JibJab Team has been working almost around the clock on our Halloween and Christmas programming so when we started this project we had one motto… “Let’s just have fun!”
You might think all we do is goof around here but even though we are making cartoons, we take it VERY seriously. There is normally a ton of thinking, planning and plotting that goes into making a JibJab film, so when we started this one, we decided to plan a little less, try some new stuff, take some chances and just trust our gut. In addition to that, we set a very strange goal for an interweb company – Let’s make as much of this as possible WITHOUT using computers!
When we started, we didn’t really have a clear idea of how it would all come together but one thing was certain… we knew we’d have a good time making it! We hope you enjoy the finished film but for us the making of the 2009 Year in Review was almost as important as the end result. Hopefully the fun we had making it is apparent in the final product. Enjoy!
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2009 – The Writing Process
Writing is always the big unknown when it comes to production planning. Sometimes the inspiration hits immediately, other times it’s like pulling teeth. With a ‘Year in Review’ there is the added uncertainty about what is going to happen between the time you write it and the time it is produced and released.
This year, as we do most years, we started in August, compiling lists of the big events of the year and identifying the song we want to use. This year we chose “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin because (i) it is in the public domain, meaning we do not have to get approvals to use it and (ii) it is mind-bogglingly catchy and infectious.
With the song chosen, we started writing lyrics the first week of September. There are two parts to writing our songs. The first is finding the “hook”. What’s the catchy line or phase that will serve as an anchor for the rest of the lyrics? The second is filling in around the hook with great gags.
Writing is an iterative process. We write, throw away, write, throw away, write, throw away, etc. The hardest thing about the process is killing your “babies”, meaning getting rid of lyrics you love but ultimately decide do not serve the piece as a whole. Ultimately, with “Never a Year Like ‘09” we had 11 versions of the lyrics before they were final. You can download a spreadsheet that shows the evolution of the lyrics over the course of the production by clicking here. You can see that the earliest versions were basically scratches of ideas whereas the differences between version 10 and version 11 are barely noticeable.
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2009 – Scratch Tracks
Before we get to the shot by shot breakdown of how we made the piece there are a few key steps that hold true for every project. Once we have a tune selected and a fairly solid first pass on the script we will bust out our junky microphone and sing a pass directly into Final Cut Pro. We call it a scratch track because that’s what it sounds like – chicken scratch! Unfortunately we did not have a splitter for the headphones that would enable us both to hear the music so we snapped a pair of $2 Virgin America headphones in half and had to sing REALLY close to each other. (Good thing we’re brothers!) Here’s some webcam shots of the fiasco as well as an audio pass of the first. As usual, play it softly. Unfortunately neither of us inherited our mother’s singing voice!
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2009 – Storyboards and Animatics
Once a script and/or scratch track are underway we typically take some time to scribble out our ideas. The goal of all this scribbling is never to make ‘beautiful Art’ but to help us figure out the best and funniest ways to communicate an idea or get a gag across. The storyboards are also refered to as thumbnails because a lot of times that’s how big the drawing are – the size of your thumbnail! These are done by our good friend and go-to funny guy Josh ‘the Wolf’ Tulman as well as a couple by our buddy Alex Hirsch…
An animatic is the very, very rough file that lets us start to see how some of our ideas will play out with the music. Normally we try to get a locked down animatic before we begin production but for this project we just dove right into making stuff as inspiration struck. Here’s a version of the animatic from 12/7/09 when a bunch of ideas were already locked. The red scenes were still up in the air at the time…
Finally, here is a Color Key for the film. This gives us a sense for the over all ‘feel’ and mood of the piece and lets us see how one scene flows into the next. Again, in a normal production this would be done up front before any animation is produced but for this project we just started making stuff and then it wasn’t until halfway through production that we started to concern ourselves with how we would pull it all together…
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2009 – Recording Sessions
The recording sessions are ALWAYS a good time! The two main voices behind this piece are our go-to guys Jim Meskimen and Gabriel Mann. Jim has been our lead character and voice guy since the pre-This Land days and you can check out his personal site here. This is our third Year in Review project working with Gabe and the guy is just the MASTER of harmonies! I swear he can hear 10,000 voices in his head and make them all come together to make beautiful music. You can check out Gabe’s stuff here.
Jim and Gabe seemed to just be having a blast in the booth and we think some of that raw ‘fun’ made it’s way into the final piece. Here’s a picture of the gang (left to right: Gabe, Jim, Evan, Gregg, John) and below that is some unedited vocal magic. Jim brought a Flip cam into the booth with him so you can see (and hear) the maestro at work! Enjoy…
And of course there wouldn’t be a track to sing to if it weren’t for the musical stylings of Mr. John Frizzell! John is a BRILLIANT film composer who has produced the scores for such films as Office Space, Beavis and Butthead Do America, Alien: Resurrection, and the upcoming angel flick “Legion”. Not only is he fantastic composer but he’s wicked funny and we always have a blast with him. Hat’s off to John!
And last, but certainly not least, let’s all take a bow for Mister Frederik Wiedmann. Freddie is a madman in Logic and can create, level or turn out a sound before you can say “Fred-meister”!
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2009 – Scene 1: The Train
When we started on this shot we all gravitated to the idea of a calendar turning pages. How else do you show all “the years that have passed in time”? Slowly the idea morphed into a timeline – like the ones in the history books with the dots on the important dates. Finally the timeline became a train track with cars that were constantly bringing new events to the end of the line. (Maybe it’s not the clearest story idea but who can resist playing with toy trains?) For this shot, Devin and Jeff had to build physical props to represent all of human history in about 2 and a half seconds then figure out how the heck to film it!
They started by just blocking it in with placeholder shapes and experimenting with different ways to push the camera down the line. Once the camera move was locked down then fun of finding images to represent different time periods began. If you step through the video frame by frame you might just find a few gems. Here’s some pics and video of the shots evolution…
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2009 – Scene 2: Bush and Obama
We’ve been making cut out images of President Bush dance around computer screens for 8 years so it was pretty rewarding to finally do it on a desktop! Because this whole video has a very ‘hand made’ feel we knew we wanted to incorporate the artists actual hands as much as possible. There is something kind of cool about seeing real people interact with animated objects…
This was not the most inventive gag but who could resist cutting up all those crusty old white dudes then plopping Obama in the middle of them…
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