Stick Your Face In It!
There are two majorly rocking Starring Yous coming into your life next week and we can’t keep quiet much longer. For starters, our Weird Al video will allow you to cast yourself into one of Yankovic’s music videos for the first time! As if that weren’t enough, we also have a guitar shredding Starring You called “The Rocker” due next week. Between “He’s Barack Obama” and these two videos, its safe to say that JibJab is declaring 2009 the summer of ROCK!
Go figure, on the day that Corey brings in her scruptious popcorn-peanut brownies, we also receive a HUMONGOUS candy bar in the mail from the peeps at Birthday Alert. To the uninitiated, Birthday Alert is a giant on Facebook, an application that over 800,000 people use daily. Take a look at the application and you’ll see that we’ve joined forces to ensure total Facebook birthday dominance! Anyways, back to the chocolate, which is so giant and hard, we could only eat it with a hammer and chisel.
By the way, if you’re down in San Diego for Comic-Con this year, don’t forget to check out some JibJab artists that are manning personal booths full of neat artwork. You can get more information here and here!
Have you been signing into JibJab with Facebook connect? If not, then you’re going to be missing out on some pretty cool features! The latest released yesterday, the ability to pull photos straight from Facebook to JibJab’s Starring You creation process. Check the video for the run down on how to raid your photo albums (and your friends photo albums) for castable photos!
We had the official team viewing of our upcoming Weird Al Yankovic video today, in celebration of the project’s completion! We’re not giving any peeks away, but our tech team got a kick out of seeing the full video for the first time, as we watched with beers in hand. The JibJab mini-fridge has an awesome beer selection, kept stocked with fresh flavors all the time. We’ve got 7 kinds to choose from right now and our bottle cap collection is getting mighty impressive! Then again, managing 1,300 pictures and videos, millions of member-uploaded heads, page after page of code and keeping dozens of projects in development requires a fridge with this much deliciousness.
Speaking of delicious, Baja Fresh is giving away free Burritos tomorrow with a beverage purchase. Considering the Baja across the street from us serves at the unofficial JibJab cafeteria, it would be wrong of us not to share the coupon with you!
JibJab has had warm fuzzy feelings for NASA ever since they called us for a copy of “This Land” to send to the International Space Station. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, we’re busting out all of our most moon-centric and spectacularly spacey Sendables.
Did someone give you a lift in their shuttle? Give a space aged “thanks for the lift” card!
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40 years is a milestone anniversary. And on big anniversaries, we like some alone time to get intimate.
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Tell that future astronaut-to-be to keep reaching for the stars!
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And of course, don’t forget to cast someone in their own moon-landing photograph! Here’s Neil Armstrong, all suited up.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to have to start prepping Mars landing eCards for 2050.
We are moving ahead full speed on our collaboration with Weird Al Yankovic, putting together what has to be one of the most insane videos we’ve ever done. What is it about? That we cannot say until it’s release, but we can hit you with this teaser image to tide you over. The video and single drops on August 4th right here at JibJab.com, so stay tuned!
If you haven’t checked out Mixergy.com yet, you owe it a click. This morning, Gregg Spiridellis represented half of the JibJab founding duo on a live interview that streamed from the site. Mixergy’s thing is really unique: Founder Andrew Warner interviews the people behind start-ups and successful business ventures, providing a catalogue of really great advice and new tactics. Check it out if you have a minute; you can even request a transcript of the interview with Gregg on the site.
[UPDATE]
The interview is up! Head to Mixergy and check it out!
Wonder how we made all of that JibJab magic happen in JOWLS? Check out our Facebook album full of behind-the-scenes photos and get a feel for how much work goes into a minute long animation. Hint: A lot!
We’re excited to present JOWLS, a parody of a classic summer blockbuster you may remember. We’ve had this one in the cooker for a while, as you may remember a teaser blog from a few months ago with a little rubber shark. Go ahead, star in your own little mini-movie! Then, tell us what favorite flick of yours you’d like to see us tackle next!
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We have a secret we’ve been hiding from you. As we hope you can understand, we always try to show you our good side. Thus, we tend to show you pictures of our studio that are nice and clean and tidy like this:
However, as we hope you can also understand, we’re aren’t always so neat and tidy here. So, if you spun yourself around 180 degrees in the picture above, you would’ve seen this:
Chaos! Actually, you can see that we really are mostly organized. However, Amia, our new Production Associate has taken it upon herself to make us *very* organized, so this pic shows her in the tear-down portion of her clean-up project. And, no, she doesn’t think it’s weird that Elvis is watching her.
A site feature that we added a little while ago, and that we love, is called ‘Staff Picks’. It’s exactly what is sounds like: It shows a JibJab employee, their favorite eCard and an explanation of why they like it.
Here’s an example showing Lauren (yes, she does always look like that):
You can find the Staff Picks section on the bottom right of the eCards page.
Fun fact: The Staff Pick picture of each employee is the same one that appears on the back of their business card; here’s Lauren’s:
As much fun as it is to work here at JibJab — see here and here and here — even we need a vacation. However, the JibJab elves, who have apparently not left the building for the season, like to punish those who dare to take some time off.
While Tim was away, all the JibJab Art, Tech and Business talent joined forces to implement the ole Wrap-The-Desk-In-Plastic-Wrap Trick on him.
Please note the extra care they took to individually wrap any tool that could be used to help cut the plastic off; it’s been three days and Tim is still removing the plastic.
Summary statistics:
Plastic wrap used = 500 square feet
Employees involved = 36
Employees dumbfounded after dragging themselves in early on a Monday morning after an exhausting vacation = 1
We had so much fun with the video tutorial yesterday that we decided to do another one!
You ever upload a head to one of our Starring You cards and found that the head just doesn’t fit right? Well, we now have a solution for you: last week we added the ability to move your head around and resize it once you place it within the card.
Please watch the video below for the tutorial:
Do you like these video tutorials? If so, please let us know by leaving a comment.
If you hadn’t noticed it already, we’re excited to let you know we added five new ways to sort content within each Category page (Ex: Movies):
1. Videos
2. Pictures
3. Starring You
4. Top Picks
5. Newest
Rather than try to explain this all out for you in words, we decided to have some fun and put together a little video tutorial on this new “Sort by” functionality. Needless to say, we are incredibly excited about it and hopefully browsing JibJab will be easier than ever as our content library grows in girth!
Happy Tutorialing!
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