The JibJab Blog

A big part of what makes producing these exciting for us is getting to try out new ideas and new techniques.  That said, not everything we attempt makes it into the final piece.  One of the sequences that got clipped before the final cut was our attempt to animate the tidal wave of money in stop-motion!   Why stop-motion you may ask?  Because it looks DAMN cool!  We were really excited about how some of these early tests came out but we ultimately couldn’t get them to jive with the rest of the video so made the hard decision to cut them out and go with collage for the scene.  That said, there is no reason not to share their awesomeness with you!  Devin, the animator on the scene, actually went to the bank and withdrew $400 (of his own money!) in singles.  He also created thousands of dollars worth of REALLY tiny bills.  We think we’re OK legally because it’d be pretty hard to pass off a 3/4 inch bill…

And here are a few of the early animated tests cut together into one little clip.  We were bummed that we couldn’t get it to work in the piece but ya never know unless ya try!

So one of the things we thought might be interesting to post is how a scene evolves from a concept to a finished segment.  As an example we’ll use Obama’s big dance number.  We’ll admit, when this idea was first pitched to us we were not immediately sold on it.  We strive to either get a gag or story point across in every scene so we had concerns that a dance clip might just come across as a cheap time filler.  That is of course until we saw Ian’s first pencil test!  The pencil test is the a roughed out version of the animation that begins to illustrate the timing, poses and layouts.  Here’s a sample…

Once we’ve got a good sense of what we are after we’ll either further refine the poses or go directly to a photo shoot.  Before we shoot we’ll print out all of the key poses for reference and then we’re ready to roll.  Here’s our pose sheet reference and just a handful of the shots of Tim bustin’ a move!  (Believe it or not there are a bunch more!)

After we’ve got all the photo assets we could possibly stand we start to build out the key poses in Photoshop.  You’ll notice that as buff as Tim is, he looks nothing like our final Obama character.  Animation is about more then just copying what’s directly in front of you, it’s about pushing an pulling shapes to get them to FEEL right.  Just look at how absurdly long Obama’s leg is on that kick!

Before we go too far in cleaning up the character poses we’ll bring them back into Flash and further refine our pencil test by drawing in some of the “in-betweens”.  Like the name sounds, “in-betweens” are the drawings between the key poses.  While working on this sequence we found that pose 12 was really distracting and we needed a better transition from pose 11 to 13…

Once we’re feeling pretty good about the movement we’ll return to the character designs and get them all cleaned up.  Next, we take our pencil test and character assets into After Effects for final animation.  As a rule we used to animate everything in Flash but over the past few years we have been slowly shifting to After Effects.  AE allows for much greater control and gives us much cleaner images on final renders.  We still use Flash in the early planning stages but after this is our first project where none of the final animation was produced with Flash.

On every scene in this movie the last step in character animation was to replace Tim’s head with the president’s noggin.  Finding Obama’s head at the right angles with the proper lighting was a time consuming task but well worth the effort.  Here’s a sample of how we searched…

The final step involves compositing in the background and adding lighting effects. Normally the background (or at least a layout drawing) would be handled before animation started but in this case the background was dependent on the animation. In addition to the blue radiating lines we also added a soft cast shadow to connect the character to the space…

As the project draws to a close one of the most fun stages of production is sound design. Because we typically produce musical videos, you could watch our videos with no sound design at all and still get the entire story… but as soon as we add the thumps, chops, explosions and screams it REALLY brings the piece to life! Sound design is one of those “unnoticed arts” meaning if it draws too much attention to itself then the designer hasn’t done a great job. On the other hand if the sound design FEELS right and supports the action then you take it for granted as if it just belongs. Our in-house team was lucky enough to partner up with Jeff Shiffman of Sound Underground, who really helped push the sound effects over the top. Once we got all our effects in place we hooked up with the Maestro, Freddie “the Fredmeister” Wiedmann to do our sound mix. While sound design is supposed to be an unnoticed art we were so impressed with the work everyone did on it we wanted to shine a little light on it. Here is a pass of the video with everything but the sound design stripped out. Check it out…

Another one of those somewhat “unnoticed” arts that really helps push the quality bar over the top is design. Our design team puts out so much unbelievable work that is either never seen or is taken for granted so we thought we’d show ’em a bit of love! One of the last minute requests that crossed their plate during this production was to pull together a DVD to pass out at the big dinner. Since people would see the DVD packaging on the tables before they saw the actual video we were tasked with the challenge of coming up with something interesting without killing the reveal. Will, our Director of Design, pulled this together in a couple of hours and just knocked our socks off…

One of the other pieces of Design Team magic that we take for granted is the subtitles. Having to put the words on top of the video is something that makes the Art team a little bit nuts but in the hands of trusty Design team we have no fear! We ultimately wound up going with a simple black and white approach but here were some of the initial test we ran to see if we could break out of tradition subtitles. While visually we loved the approach we found that once it was injected into the video it became hard to read, thus defeating the purpose of subtitles to begin with! Check ’em out…

As the video started to shape up we were seeing so much incredible art we thought, heck, why not create a store?  Every couple of days we’d see something and say, “Man, that’d be awesome on a T-shirt” so the logical conclusion was to put it on a t-shirt.  And a mug.  And a mousepad.  And a handful of other really cool products.  At first we were a bit wary of “print on demand” products so we ordered a few samples and once they came in we were just blown away by the quality!  Check out the gang sportin’ the samples…

You can nab any of those goodies over at the store! Once we started to get excited about the idea of selling products our Design team went to town.  They began raiding the production folders on our server and grabbing Art from all the members of the team.  Here is just a sampling of the images that they pulled together …

And here’s a sample of what all that great stuff looks like on our products.  Check out the array of high quality goods!  You know you wanna buy stuff, right?  Common, bust out the old credit card and grab some Obama goodness!

A quick side note to the whole store experience – we tried to make Super Obama stamps but the post office said it was a no go.  Here’s a glimpse of what could have been…

After months and months of creating, planning, producing and coordinating, there is nothing more satisfying then kicking back in penguin suits (aka, tuxedos) and watching the leader of the free world watch – and hopefully laugh at – something that sprung from the collective imagination of myself, my brother and the amazingly talented people we work with at JibJab.

The premiere was covered LIVE on C-SPAN on Friday, June 19.  We were easy to spot in the crowd…  the guys who looked totally out of place among the gathered politicians, dignitaries, broadcast journalists and other muckety-mucks.

The look on Obama’s face was priceless as we presented the man himself with the cartoon.  CBS kept a camera on Barack the whole time, allowing us (and by proxy, you) to check out the reaction, and our reaction to his reaction.  Check it out below and keep an eye out for more cool pictures and stories from the night as they come in!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

So 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 profusely 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 we thank you from the bottom of our JibJabby hearts!  Our goal is to keep making stuff that is worthy of your time and hopefully gives us all a few laughs.

And last, but CERTAINLY 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!  This October JibJab will celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary and my brother and I think one of our greatest accomplishments has been our ability to attract such really cool, really talented people.  Everyone here helped make this production WAY better than it could have been without them so thanks guys!

“He’s Barack Obama”

Directed by: Evan & Gregg Spiridellis
Written by: Gregg & Evan Spiridellis
Music Producer: John Frizzell
Voice Talent: Jess Harnell, Gabriel Mann, Jim Meskimen
Musicians:  Chris Shiflett, Taylor Hawkins, Chris Chaney, Roger Joseph Manning Jr.
Production Design: Ian Worrel
Costume Design: Leighton Aycock Bowers
Obama Model: Tim Gillons
Background & Character Design: Ian Worrel, Phil Vose, Evan Spiridellis, Dave Bergmann
Animators: Kevin Elam, Mike Chiechi, Evan Spiridellis, Jeff Gill, Devin Bell
Visual FX: Ethan Metzger, Jeff Gill, Alan Cook, Amanda Spalinkski
Graphic Design: Will Staehle
Sound Design: Evan & Gregg Spiridellis, Jeff Shiffman
Audio Engineer: Frederik Wiedmann
Production Manager: Lauren Lloyd
Production Support: Maureen Tzudiker

Not everyone pictured…

When we make one of these big two-minute videos there are literally thousands upon thousands of photos, pictures and drawings that get created to help us cross the finish line.  We’ve uploaded a bunch of extra images to a Facebook gallery for your perusal.  If these “Behind the Scenes” have left you wanting more check out this gallery…