The JibJab Blog

Here’s a print sheet for Karzai and Abdullah Abdallah.  This was a great gag…

You just can’t go wrong when you have Ahmadinejad getting attacked by cute, blue, puffy birds!  Here is Ian showing how he created Iranian president…

And here are the rest of the Ahmadinejad character assets…

And finally, the Twitter birds.  We tried a few variations on the birds – some were cut out paper and some were puff balls with googlie eyes.  They all looked pretty cool if you ask me…

We had a lot of ideas about this shot when we were getting started. Most of them revolved around the two guys chuggin’ beers with Obama on the White House lawn but 1) there is a lot of Obama in this video already and 2) we thought it was kinda funny to see Sgt. Crowley draw his weapon. We do, however, wish we could have worked the beer in. Oh Well!

Here’s some of Romney’s awesome character designs, and below that is Mike animating away…

The fight cloud is one of earliest bits of animation for this project. We took some cotton balls, wire and tiny star stickers then cut random arms and legs from magazines and WALLAH! Instant cartoon fight!

And here’s some of Romney’s characters, and Kevin on the down-shooter…

Who is that finger-biting man you may ask?  Well, it’s none other then our very own Dan Milano!  But don’t worry, no fingers were actually harmed durning the making of this scene.

This was one of the most fun scenes to produce and it goes by in the blink of an eye.  All of the characters are ACTUAL finger  puppets.  We painted our fingers to looks like fancy politician clothes then hot glued cut out heads to the tips of our fingers.  (If you have ever touched a hot glue gun you’ll know it’s no fun!)  Here’s some great shots of the guys goofing around in the studio…

The only thing better then Sarah Palin going rogue is Sarah Palin going rogue while riding a moose! Here are some thumbnail drawings to help us figure out how they should move and below that is a quick scan of the poses on yellow post-its so we could actually ‘see it’ before taking the time to animate all those little pieces of paper…

The more characters, the more pieces. The more pieces, the more complicated it is to produce! For this shot Kevin had to breakout the old school timing charts to figure out exactly how all those tiny assets should be moving…

It’s a shame this scene goes by so fast in the final video. This Kim Jung Il animation is probably one of the funniest bits of business that Kevin has ever produced! I still laugh every time I watch it!

The last bit of magic to complete this scene was the background. Ian developed a method of cutting all the backgrounds out of layered tissue paper so we could light them from behind and get that ‘illuminated’ feel…

This clip is the very first animated test for when we begin making this project and trying to figure out ‘the look’. Ian produced this 100% in After Effects with the intention of having it LOOK handmade and he did a pretty darn good job!

Ultimately we felt like this film should actually BE handmade so he went back and built all the assets out of clay, wire and cotton. Here is the pig that he made out of sculpey and mounted on the top of a pencil. It’s super high tech 3D stuff, I tell ya!

From the moment we heard this line in the lyrics we knew we wanted to have a pervy, slightly disgusting tongue darting around inside a cut out mouth. Originally we were gonna animate a kaleidoscope of sexy woman circling his head but once we saw the results of a quick web cam test we realized we didn’t need it!

As a side note, we did about 50 takes while filming this scene and Evan actually sprained his tongue!  He didn’t know it while they were filming but the next day the top of his throat was killing him and he thought he was sick until he realized what it was.  Long live the Arts!

We knew from the get go that we wanted to completely wreck a toy car for this shot. We tossed around the idea blowing it up with firecrackers but we ultimately settled on two items – A) a hammer and B) a toy car.

And here’s the take that made it into the final piece…

This is another one of the first shots that we began working on. It was the ultimate combination of real sets, live-action puppetry and stop motion. Devin built the plane out of clay and filmed it on fishing wire. Evan built the NYC skyline with paper cut-outs. Ian designed and animated the waves on the down-shooter and Devin animated the splash with tissue paper. At the end, Ian pulled all the pieces together and threw in one his fancy, back lit tissue paper backgrounds.

There was LOTS of cotton used in the making of this video. For this scene, Devin set up multiple layers of glass so he could animate cotton floating by at different speeds to give the illusion of smoke.

Heading into this scene we had one thing in mind. We wanted to communicate pure recklessness! Originally we wanted to get some baby dolls and throw them across the room to a doctors open arms but even that didn’t feel careless enough. We decided on cut out legs to match the rest of the piece and for the babies we got these little plastic guys from Michaels. They’re about 3/4 of an inch tall…

We had a lot of different ideas about how to show Obama getting ‘spurned’ by the Olympic committee but none of them really showcased the key element of the scene… He chased it pretty hard and really wanted to bring it home. Jeff came up with the gag of turning the red Olympic ring into the Ghostbuster-esque NO sign and we all said YES! It’s tricky when you only have one and a half seconds to communicate an idea and get across a gag but I think he nailed it on that one…