The JibJab Blog

Take a look at the animatic from our Monster Mash video and you’ll see the skeleton behind the creation of a Starring You.  Location concepts and character angles are decided right away and usually make it to the final cut, the dancing however is quite often left to interpretation.  While the story remains the same, sometimes we snip out an idea or two, like those hot babes hanging out with Dracula.  Sucks for him.

When launching a ton of new content all over the site like we did with Halloween, the responsibilities involved are massive.  Every piece we launch goes through testing, tweaks, renders and troubleshooting with a whole team of people. That aside, one of the biggest tasks can be getting graphics and thumbnails together so we can feature content all over the site as well as our channels on other websites all over the net.  Between newsletters, ads, logos, banners and thumbs, our design team has to create dozens of mini images that best convey what the video or category is all about.  The process is nothing to thumb your nose at, so production team, we salute you!  Here is a small taste of the array of images that went into Halloween’s launch this year.

More Monster Mash fun-factoids!  Shooting dozens of videos a year on our little green screen, we often use our small stash of props in as many ways as we can.  JibJabbers with keen eyes will notice toy guns, beat up suits and other hand props making a few repeat appearances.  When it came time to find a brain for the Monster Mash, we realized we had just the thing already lying around!  Look familiar?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Send a belated birthday brain over here.

More fun Monster Mash trivia!  We needed someone with extra lanky arms for our monstrous bride and our casting landed right on Jeff, who did a wonderful bride boogie for us.  For covering up his manliness, long sleeves and gloves did a wonder!  When we can, we like to use gloves and loosefitting clothes as much as possible so that everyone will feel comfortable putting their head on our characters, no matter what their color, shape or size may be, even if they’re a bearded 20-something!

When making characters for our Starring You dances, everything but the head is costume designed and made up. Sometimes in our little 425×319 pixel movies, you lose great details that take a lot of time to put together. That brings us to the werewolf from the Monster Mash, who we gave some really cool, but easily missed feet with some super long nails. Here Evan mixes the paint up, Alan paints the paint on and Devin wears the wolf toes.