The JibJab Blog

Building the King of Pop was one of the most fun puppets of all.  Originally we had toyed around with the idea of making him Moonwalk across a golden stage but ultimately decided his classic crotch grabbing gesture was the way to go (plus it was way easier to build!)  Here’s a little clip that shows what a jimmy-rig job the puppet actually is.  It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of tape and some wire…

And here’s the sneak peek of MJ that we had posted prior to the videos release.  It’s got the babies on a stick…

It wouldn’t be a 2009 in Review without Keyboard Cat!  If you’re unfamiliar with the magic that is Keyboard Cat you can read about him here and watch him in action here.  As for our silly little puppet, here it is…

The hardest thing we come across when writing the annual Year in Review is how to squeeze in all the crazy stuff that happens over the course of 12 months.  This year the line “Sure there’s stuff we missed” gave us the opportunity to get in all kinds of good stuff that would have normally fallen by the wayside.  For instance, the whole Tiger Woods debacle didn’t come up until well after we had locked lyrics so he became the punchline of the scene.

Here are the props and set that made it into the final video.  If you look closely you’ll notice they are all propped up on just about anything we could find that was white.  There’s white gaffers tape, spray paint caps, white thread and plastic coffee cup lids.  We are nothing if not makeshift…

Finally, we couldn’t resist posting the character design for our favorite cameo in this sequence.  It’s Christian Bale freaking the F out on the poor lighting guy during the filming of the last Terminator movie.  There was a four minute rant that went around the internet and since we have no idea who the lighting guy was we had Gregg make as scared a face as possible and snuck him in there…

Oh, wait a sec…  I thought this post was finished but HE’S gonna let us finish…

For the grand finale we knew we wanted it to be just that… GRAND.  The question was how to take all the madness that appeared in the previous 2 minutes of the video and tie it all together.  The answer was a giant cake and fireworks.  As Ian began filming and compositing everything together in After Effects Devin animated this bit of fireworks on the down-shooter.  Nothing like cotton, tin foil strips and sequins in the hands of a great animator…

Some other effects that got composited in were sparklers and party poppers.  The party poppers were back lit and filmed in slow motion at 60 frames per second so we could actually see what was happening.  As is typically the case, cleaning up is just plain exhausting!

We fully recognize that JibJab is nothing without the people that come to visit our site and share our work so we wanted to send out a heart-felt thanks and some good New Years wishes from us to you. What better way to let you know who we are then to include our mugs!  Every JibJab team member has a goofy face on the back of their business cards so, like with the rest of this project, we grabbed the Exacto knife, cut ’em out and slide ’em around on some paper. Here’s 35 of the hardest working people you’ll ever meet!

Once all the animation is complete we always have a blast adding sound effects to the piece. Sound always gives it that extra little juice to help drive home what we’re going for. Sometimes it can make a piece feel more ‘real’ and sometimes it just makes it funnier. Whatever the case, sound design gives way more personality to a piece.

For this video we wanted to stick with the whole home-made vibe so the majority of what you hear sprinkled in is us goofing around on the microphone. Sure we could have found dogs growling in our sound library but having Gregg bark into the microphone when Michael Vick gets attacked was much funnier! And yeah, we could have found good sounds for the Twitter birds but having Evan go “Peck! Peck! Peck! Peck!” into the mic just fit the feel of the video. Have a watch (and listen) to the video with everything but the sound design stripped out. You’ll see we did use some fancy sound effects but the bulk of it was just goofy fun…

As usual, if you’ve made it through all the “Behind the Scenes” posts we want to thank you for taking the time to check it all out.  More importantly, we assume if you’ve read all these posts then you must be a fan and we want to thank you from the bottom of our JibJabby hearts for sharing our work with your friends and family!  We always remember that it’s your support that allows us to keep doing what we love so thank you, thank you, thank you!  Our goal is to keep making stuff that is worthy of your time and hopefully gives us all a few laughs.

Last, but not least, here is a list of all the amazingly talented folks who helped make this project happen!  Everyone listed below kicked some SERIOUS ass!  It is a pure joy to work with such talented, dedicated and creative people…

“Never a Year Like ’09”

Directed by: Evan & Gregg Spiridellis
Written by: Gregg Spiridellis, Andy Ochiltree
Art Team: Evan Spiridellis, Ian Worrel, Kevin Elam, Devin Bell, Alan Cook, Jeff Gill, Mike Chiechi, Amanda Rynda, Will Staehle, Romney Caswell
Music Producer: John Frizzell
Voice Talent: Jim Meskimen and Gabriel Mann
Audio Engineer: Frederik Wiedmann
Production Manager: Lauren Lloyd
Production Support: Maureen Tzudiker

Here’s another look at some of the puppetry going into our 2009 Year in Review (due in one week!). This time we’ve got a peek at our belated salute to the dearly departed King of Pop.

We’re (hoping to!) cap off production today and finish the audio mix this evening. Then a well deserved holiday break for the team before we launch it next Monday!

Fear not! JibJab’s 2009 year in review, entitled “Never a Year like 09′” is on it’s way, due Monday December 28th!

We are still cranking away at it, adding more detail, more gags and more animation!  As we’ve teased before, this year’s review is being done almost ENTIRELY with paper cut-outs and puppets, leaving our fancy animation programs to collect dust.  Here’s a peek at a few of the famous folks in our tribute to those who passed away this year. More will be featured in the review!