The JibJab Blog

OK. We know we’ve told this joke before but watching Michael Vick get attacked by a dog will never get old!

The idea behind this scene was to make it feel like those paper doll cut outs that little kids dress up. For the base character underneath the uniforms we imagined that once he left the Jets he sat around in his tighty whiteys drinking beer and watching TV. When the Vikings costume comes back, the remote control flies away and the beer is replaced by a football. Here is the final character and background design as well as a shot of Devin animating away!

When we were building assets we tended to grab whatever materials were closest at hand. In this case, the hallowed halls of Congress were built on the back of a case of Bud!

And here’s a fun test shot taken with the iphone to see how it looks in camera…

Our friend Devin is a Master or materials! Who else would have grabbed a mini-Squash when asked to build Balloon Boy’s balloon?

We also tried animating this scene with and without poor Falcon in there. Ultimately we felt like the ridiculous amount of press coverage Balloon Boy got was way funnier than the kid that was supposedly whisked off into the clouds. Here’s the take that got cut…

So we fully recognized that this is the exact same shot we used in “This Land” but we figured 1) why mess with a good thing and 2) this could be our last opportunity to squeeze ‘Governor’ Schwarzenegger into a JibJab video. We love Arnold and will be sad to see him reach the end of his term limit.

Here’s how the character assets came together and below that is Kevin animating away on the down shooter. If you look at the top of the photo you can see the camera mounted to a pole and pointing down at the character – hence the name “down-shooter”!

And once the character was animated we had to composite him into a background. For this we built a tiered set of the Hollywood hills so we could animate tissue paper flames behind each row. The original goal was to get the stop-motion flames filmed and then go back, cover the set in rubber cement and actually set it ablaze but 1) we were happy with how the tissue paper flames came out and 2) we just plain ran out of time. Oh well. Maybe we’ll get to light something on fire for our next production!

Here is just one of about 10,000 print sheets that we created for this project. Even though this was a mostly computer-less project we still designed and scaled a lot of what we produced in Photoshop then had to print big 13×19 sheets. Here is the economic shredder broken into all its elements and below that is a shot of all the assets laid together. (You’ll also notice Octomom’s legs tucked in there too as we tried to get as much as possible onto each sheet to save trees and money!)

We were slightly concerned about how to illustrate this line in the song and still keep it to a PG-13 rating but the character remains fully clothed and Jeff’s animation had us rolling on the floor!

This was probably the longest scene in the whole short so we had to figure out how to keep it engaging and evolving with each new idea presented. We knew we wanted to do a lot of stuff with popsicle sticks on this project and this felt like the perfect opportunity! Below are some shots of Romney designing and building all the character and set pieces. We also knew that we wanted to have people physically remove the set to reveal the airplane and Indian Jones-esque map below so that added a lot of complication to the set up. Alan did a BEAUTIFUL job lighting and setting up the shot plus he designed and animated the map as well…

This is another shot that combined paper cut-out character animation with a live-action background. Here’s the print sheet for the Sotomayor assets as well as the character and flags underneath the down-shooter You’ll notice some of the Obama Nobel Prize assets tucked on there as well. Below that are some sample camera moves taken on the iPhone of the track up the stairs. Mike built an awesome little set!

Nothing like taking the opportunity to show President Obama with his biggest supporters!

For this shot we knew we wanted to have live-action arms mixed with a janky puppet. The inspiration for having Kadafi burst through the roof of the UN building was Animal at the end of the Muppet Movie. Unlike Animal, Kadafi went cookoo on the international stage instead of a deserted ghost town!

Here is the initial piece of visual development art for designing the character and background. You can see below that whenever we need a body part (or the inside of a mouth) we just open Photo Booth and snap a shot with the webcam…

Here is the set as a work-in-progress and below that is Evan and Mike testing out the puppet. We love playing with goofy little puppets!

If you don’t know about Three Wolf Moon you can check it out here.  The shirt received a bunch of fake reviews on Amazon claiming that it had amazing healing powers and that whoever wears it will become irresistable to woman and strike fear into other males.  There are over 17,000 customer reviews and some of them are HYSTERICAL!

As for designing the shot, it was back to the popsicle sticks.  Here’s Mike and Jeff on their makeshift set taped to the front of an iMac.  It aint fancy but it worked!

This is our first Year in Review that enabled us to give a shout out to some of the cultural icons that passed away in the past 12 months.  While only a few names were worked into the lyrics we knew we would start the heaven sequence with an array of angels.  (It was just too difficult to work the name Ricardo Montalbán into the lyrics!)

Here’s a handful of the angels that populate the scene courtesy of Mrs. Amanda Rynda…

When it came to filming the scene it proved to be way more complicated than we anticipated.  Here we have Alan working the camera, Devin pulling the focus and Evan operating the angels on sticks…

A final side note about this scene – on the morning we were set to film we read that Roy Disney Jr. passed away.  We wouldn’t have felt right not including him so we quickly pulled together a Roy angel and squeezed him into the shot.  Here’s a complete list of the angels that made the scene:

– Roy Disney Jr., Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Bea Arthur, Jack Kemp, David Carradine, Ricardo Montalbán, Captain Lou Albano, Dom Deluise, John Hughes, Robert Novak, DJ AM, Robert McNamara, Irving Penn, Mary Travers, Socks the Cat and Gidget the Taco Bell dog.

We knew from the get go that Farrah Fawcett would be perched atop the piano but originally Walter and Ed were gonna be sitting side by side tickling the ivories.  Once we started building the puppets it became clear Walter should be rockin’ the harp…

Here’s an early test to see how they looked on camera and below that is the filming of the scene.  There’s nothing better than arms on wires!

We debated putting Ted Kennedy at a bar but we figured it would be a party up there so why not? It’s nice see the Kennedy boys reunited and Papa Joe is behind the bar pouring the Chivas…

And here you can see us filming the scene for the video. Ted, Jack and Bobby’s arms are all hinged with a bit of wire and string is tied to their hands. Cheers!

Finally, here’s an example of some more ‘designy’ clouds that we were experimenting with. Ian had put together these beautiful little cottony balls and spray painted them pink but we ultimately decided to go with a simpler approach…