The JibJab Blog

Stick Your Face In It!

Hanukkah in August

While most people don’t even have labor day on their minds yet, our production schedule has us working on our big holiday pieces up to six months in advance! Right now we’re cranking away on Halloween, Christmas AND Hanukkah stuff. Most of our art and animations for the December holidays will remain top secret for quite some time and we’ll be blogging Halloween stuff like crazy come October, but just in case you were wondering what our animators are up to, we’re launching head on into the holiday season!

Above, a grab from our animatic to “The 8 Days of Hanukkah”.

August 20, 2009
Updates from Around the Team

We’ve got some fun links to share from our various weekend excursions and activities, starting with Ian, one of our uber talented animators, who just put the finishing touches on his student film that blew us away last year. Check it out and leave loads of feed back on his youtube channel!

Joey, mecha Marketing and Ad Ops master as well as incredible bicyclist has been sharing videos and pictures of his bike excursions and tricks. We’re pretty impressed, check them out and be impressed as well! Extra pics at the Feaverish flickr account.

Justin, king of kitschy tiki and dinosaur art had a showing at the 9th annual Tiki Oasis convention. Not familiar? It’s basically the most chill gathering of people ever, celebrating surf and tiki culture. Justin posted an original bit of artwork for the event over on his blog.

August 17, 2009
Four Fresh Ones for the Weekend

We just posted a slew of fresh (and free) shorties to the site! And we mean fresh in two ways, these cards are both brand spankin’ new and a perfect for the smart-alec harbored inside of you. Peruse the n00bs and enjoy a hot summer weekend!

Living in LA, we’re subject to one of the worst commutes in the United States. Thus we bring you… Commuting Sucks.

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We somehow have topped previous levels of weirdness in our latest WTF card.

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We’ve been working on some sports taunts, trying to make them as unspecific as possible, for use in any sport or with any team. Your Team Sucks definitely represents a big win.

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It’s Official. What’s official? You’re about to find out.

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August 14, 2009
Blog Cabin

The JibJab office is always beyond hectic. That’s why every few months Gregg and Evan head somewhere a bit more remote to get away from the day to day craziness of running a web business. Their go-to spot is always Lake Arrowhead. It’s close enough to LA that they can drive but it still feels like worlds away. This time they “holed up” in a log cabin out in the wilderness for several days doing nothing but planning the next year’s worth of moves for JibJab. Rustic (and cheap)!

August 13, 2009
The Perilous Piñata

Our studio has had a new project filming almost every day this August, one of the latest being a piece we call “Piñata Revenge”. We think you can figure out the gist of this birthday-card-to-be from what you see on screen, so here is a bonus fun fact: the super hero gloves from He’s Barack Obama work perfect when manipulating objects on a blue screen!

August 12, 2009
Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Puppet

In the studio last week, we had a very special impersonator hanging around. The puppet was masterfully designed and constructed by Mike, one of our multi-talented animators. Look for this hound dog on the site very soon!

August 11, 2009
C.N.R. B.T.S. III: Visiting The Estate

In order to nab as many high quality photos of Charles Neilson Reilly as we could muster, we went to the source… CNR’s home in Beverly Hills! Reilly’s partner, Patrick Hughes, invited us to their home and provided us with pictures, videos and stories behind the man of so much myth. We brought back loads of amazing references for the animation, so we’re super grateful to Patrick for their support. Check out some of the photos we were lucky enough to get, these being from an appearance on Johnny Carson!

August 10, 2009
Birthday Bonanza

In the summer lull between major holidays, we’re getting a head start on Christmas and working to fill up our library with new funny birthday cards. This week saw the launch of three big ones, with several more in the pipeline to be released throughout August.

We teased an image from the Rocker last week and now it’s finally up! The Rocker is available in both Birthday and You Rock flavors. We’ll dedicate this make to U2 legend “The Edge” who celebrates his birthday tomorrow. Happy Birthday, the Edge, you rock!

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The beatboxing flautist was a huge hit over the 4th of July with his rendition of “Stars and Stripes”. You’ll see him returning for many-a-holiday this year, but first we had to get his funky happy birthday song up and at em. Definitely a new staff favorite at JibJab.

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Finally, you’ll see a cool little Starring You birthday retrospective called Looking Back on Your Birthday. Lauren, of the JibJab staff, celebrated her birthday this week… so we’ll pop her in this card for your amusement.

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August 7, 2009
C.N.R. B.T.S. II !

Can’t get enough of the new Weird Al/JibJab video “CNR”? Check out our new Facebook album chock full of art and production photos sure to spoil all the magic for you!

August 6, 2009
The Kudos Wheel Revealed!

Regular readers of this blog will know that early this summer we launched a unique inter-office encouragement system called KudoBot.

You can read all about it here but, in a nutshell, if anyone in the company does anything you think is cool, you can log into our internal system and give them Kudos. Every morning, an automated e-mail goes out to the entire company with a digest of the prior days’ Kudos. It’s a great way for everyone to see all the good work that’s getting done across the company.

While we had no idea what the “reward” for getting Kudos would be when Evan and Gregg started the experiment, that was all cleared up last Friday at an All Hands team meeting, when “THE WHEEL” was unveiled.

Our genius lead designer, Will, created a gorgeous carnival style spinning wheel and the top 10 Kudo recipients (+3 special mentions) were invited to spin the wheel for cold hard cash!

Check out this video of our lead engineer, Chris, spinning the wheel:

The wheel is numbered 1-30. The first spinner (the #10 top Kudo recipient) multiplied the number they land on by $1. The second spinner (the #9 Kudo recipient) multiplied the number they spin by $2, the third spinner by $3, all the way up to the #1 Kudo recipient who could potentially spin a 30 and pocket $300 clams! To the dismay of Gregg and Evan, most people spun high, leaving this group with a solid amount of green!

Congrats to all the Kudobot cash winners!

August 5, 2009
C.N.R. B.T.S.!

We’re going to give you a few good peeks behind the scenes this week, highlighting the fun we had making Weird Al’s new video “CNR”. The first comes from our green screen, where Devin, Glenn and our crew played the badass body of Mr. Reilly himself. It’s not every day you’re told to act like you’re riding a dinosaur, so serious kudos to Devin for nailing the movements behind the man!

August 4, 2009
Turn a JibJab picture into your Facebook photo!

Want to turn your freshly-made JibJab picture in to your Facebook profile photo?

Here’s how you do it:

1. Login to your JibJab account with your Facebook info by clicking the ‘Login with Facebook’ link at the top of any page on JibJab.com.

2. Select any picture on the site and click ‘Personalize’ or ‘Share’; we suggest these:

http://sendables.jibjab.com/category/sy_profile_pics

3. After personalizing the picture, on the ‘Share’ page, click the new, blue ‘Upload’ button. This will automagically copy the picture in to your Facebook Photos page, in a new album called ‘JibJab Photos’.

4. To make this new JibJab picture your Facebook profile photo, simply click on your current Facebook profile photo, click the ‘Change Profile Picture’ link and then click the link to select a profile photo from your ‘Profile Picture Album.’

Repeat often to match your current mood!

August 3, 2009
Barack’s Behind

Going back through the “He’s Barack Obama” files, we found another treasure. This close up of the backside of Barack’s supersuit has cracked our staff up on many, many occasions. Now we share it with you. BEHOLD!

July 31, 2009
Dancing Doodie Doodles!

We may have devised the best summer intern challenge of all time when we asked our squad of 3 Jibterns to present us with a variety of dancing doodies in preparation for an upcoming card. The result was hilarious and strange smattering of muck! Which dookie design won? You’ll have to wait for the final piece to find out, in the meantime check out the doodles below, but if you don’t like the color brown, don’t scroll down!

July 30, 2009
Team Love

We were going through pictures from last month’s release of “He’s Barack Obama” and stumbled upon this screen grab. Within seconds of the video’s release, the whole team ran to Facebook and shared our latest project with our friends, completely taking over our feeds. This is what we saw when we logged in that evening… a great testament to how our whole group supports what we do (and how addicted to Facebook we are)!

July 29, 2009