We’ve posted another Facebook album full of art on our … Facebook. This time we chronicled the dickens out of our Charles Dickens masterpiece, A Christmas Carol! Click on to see a story of Christmas past!
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Our RagTag Christmas Tree
We busted the old tree out of the box this week, adorning her with candy canes, ElfYourself ornaments and the occasional Nasty Santa doll left over from a few years back. For a star, we made good use of a JibJab beanie cap with a dart stuck on it. That’s just how we roll here. Now add a few empty bottles of beer and we’ll really be showing our Christmas spirit!
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You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out Wallpapers!
As we like to do after releasing new projects, we’re making a few of our backgrounds available for your desktop background! Just click any of these backgrounds from You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out and you’ll get a massive, free image to right click and set as a festive holiday wallpaper!
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The ElfYourself Album
For one final look behind the scenes at ElfYourself, we’ve posted a Facebook album with our 37 favorite photos. Enjoy!
Meanwhile, has anyone seen this awesome video of the elves arriving in New York City? Epic!
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Banned in Iran
A staffer at JibJab has family in Iran and they passed over this little nugget of information to the studio… JibJab.com has been banned for the entire country! This is part of a censorship that has been ongoing for the past few years which has included Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. We just can’t figure out what exactly we may have done to cause a rift with the country’s government…
Oh well, back to creating our 2009 year in review…
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The Faces Behind the ElfYourself’s Dances!
When it came to getting dancers for this year’s Hip Hop ElfYourself we knew exactly who to turn to… the incredible talents of the guys fromSickStep! You may recognize the moves of JibJab’s favorite dance crew from our last foray into break dancing, the aptly titled Breakin. Luckily they were cool with donning elf outfits and entertained us for hours on end with their sickest of steps.
Most of our dances are set against a blue or green screen so we can easily remove color in post production and place the elves in a vibrant environment. With ElfYourself HipHop we placed down white mats that we would end up keeping in the final video as a snowy dance floor, plus it gave the breakdancers a surface comfortable enough to do their most complicated tricks on, and slick enough not to destroy their costumes.
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Creating Elf Wear
When Office Max started ElfYourself back in 2006, the elves had a fairly simple dance routine in a very specific green outfit. To the untrained eye, it would seem that the classic outfit hasn’t changed much over the last three years, but secretly it has seen a few upgrades. We learned our lesson last year, when we pushed the classic green costumes to the limit while creating Disco and Country dances. We tore big holes in the pants which we had to edit out in post production, quite embarrassing for our elves.
With a breakdance topping this year’s list of new dances, we had to step up the elasticity and provide tights and seams that wouldn’t burst, no matter how many propeller spins the elves might do. Creating the perfect Elf costume was no easy task, but our costume designer Adam (below) stepped it up and made us some amazing threads that held steady. Thanks for keeping pants on the elves, Adam!
Meanwhile, Office Max put together a viral sensation in New York that had hundreds of costumes in motion. Don’t ask us how they got those hats to stay on, the answer can only be elf magic.
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A Feast of Features
Big shout outs to our friends at MySpace, MetaCafe, Yahoo Butterfinger Network and Daily Motion who rocked our world with front page features yesterday in honor of Thanksgiving! While you enjoy your food coma this weekend, click the above links for their comedy sections, recommended by us!
We may be a day late on giving thanks, but hey… we had some green bean casserole to devour.
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Birthday Wagon!
As previously explored on the blog, Corey brings a wagon filled with treats around the office every Wednesday to put a little pep in our mid-week step. While we all feasted on treats, we were sad that Corey never really gets to have a wagon surprise of her own. But that changed this week. In honor of her Thanksgiving birthday, we presented her with a surprise birthday cake… on wheels!
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Mixing it Up for 2009’s YIR
We’re running out of days in 2009, which must mean one thing… our annual Year-In-Review has begun production! We always try to keep our animations fresh by varying up the styles we use and this year we’re going for something entirely different than we’ve ever attempted before. For 2009’s recap we’re getting hands on with “crafty” animation techniques, literally. We’re busting out knives, construction paper, puffy cotton balls and clay and capturing images on the improvised camera rig pictured below!
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JibJab is Now Ad-Free! (Almost)
We’re thrilled to announce that JibJab.com has been stripped of 90% of all banner ads! There are still a few spots here and there that contain ads but they are off the most visited sections of our website and the remaining ads will be coming down in the weeks and months ahead.
Why are we excited? From an artistic point of view, we’re excited that you can enjoy the fruits of our labor without having annoying flashing video ads interrupting your experience. From a technology product point of view, we are glad to have the real estate available so that we can offer you more cool JibJab-related content and features.
This move is a big deal for us. For the past three years we have been working hard to move the company away from relying on advertising to a business model that is more responsive to YOU, our audience. We believe that getting rid of ads will enable us to serve you better. The catch? We’re betting that there are enough people who value our work out there that are willing to spend a few bucks to help support the artists and technologists who make all of this stuff possible. From this day forward, we serve you, not the advertiser.
We hope you enjoy our more streamlined and eye-pleasing experience and, if you haven’t already, and lots and lots of you have, consider supporting us by becoming a Member today!
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“Be Thankful” Animatics
Digging around our library to find turkey sketches yesterday, we also stumbled across these early animatics for “Be Thankful”. Watch these and get a great idea of the evolution our animations go through.
And of course, compare these to the final product here…
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A Flock of Turkeys
When designing a character that gets as much screen time as the turkey from Be Thankful, we go through many concepts and renditions. Check out our new Facebook album full of fowls that could have been!
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An Avalanche of Holiday Stuff Has Gone Live!
A lot of blood, sweat, tears and holiday cheer went into delivering this, a mind boggling amount of holiday content! We’ll be highlighting these pieces and the late nights that went into creating them as we plow through the next few months, but for now, check out our filtering system for the holidays, which will guide you to our new movies and cast 1-5 people in our huge catalog of FREE holiday photos!
Again, stop reading this blog and go have some fun!
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