The JibJab Blog

Greetings JibJabbers!

Every four years, my brother and I are blessed with a political circus so ripe with absurdity that ‘finding the funny’ becomes like shooting fish in a barrel. In 2000, we created the Bush/Gore rap battle. In 2004, we produced This Land. Now, in 2008, we’re pleased to present Time for Some Campaignin’!

Our latest musical romp is a parody of Bob Dylan’s 1960s political anthem, The Times They Are A-Changin’. We thought Dylan’s true call for revolutionary change juxtaposed against the modern political process would be funny. Plus, we just wanted an excuse to use the word “juxtaposed” in our blog.

This video was by far the most difficult election video we have ever produced. When we started, Hillary was still in the race, which meant we couldn’t take the tit-for-tat approach that had worked so well for us in the past. While it was painful at first, creative constraints are always good and having three candidates forced us make something entirely new. The worst thing we could have done is mimicked our past work.

Since my brother and I started JibJab 8 ½ years ago, we have been fascinated by the opportunity the Web offers to create new entertainment experiences. We have found that unlike traditional media, where independent creators are virtually shut out, if you do something new and interesting online, people will find it and share it with their friends.

This year, our desire to do something new manifested itself in our STARRING YOU!® technology. Thanks to our incredible technology team, users can upload photos, cut out heads, and put themselves, family and friends into the latest election video. You can give it a try yourself here: http://Sendables.JibJab.com/

Starring You! is a small part of a much bigger initiative underway here at JibJab called JibJab Sendables®. In a nutshell, we are trying to reinvent eCards. By working with the best storytellers and artists in the world it is our goal to offer something better than the dancing cats and cuddly bunnies you’ll find on most eCard websites.

There are over 1,000 JibJab Sendables eCards in our library in categories ranging from birthdays and anniversaries to flirts, disses and everyday fun. A huge number are free and some are available exclusively to JibJab subscribers. If you like our political videos, you have to check them out!

We would like to thank the millions of people who have supported JibJab over the years (especially the 2+ million members who have signed up to receive our free updates). Without your support emailing our work to your friends, the great experiment that is JibJab would never have made it to this point. We hope you enjoy our latest video and if you like it, pass it along!

Best wishes,

Gregg, Evan & the entire JibJab Team

People always ask us how we make our JibJab videos. The release of our latest election video felt like a great opportunity to describe the process from soup to nuts! There is also a TON of writing, design, music and artwork created during the process that never sees the light of day. Now, thanks to the wonders of blogging, we can give you, our beloved audience, a sneaky peeky!

There are 3 basic phases to creating a JibJab that we will go through step by step…
– Pre-production: Coming up with the idea, writing the lyrics and laying the ground work
– Production: Doing the actual designing and animating
– Post Production: All the stuff to get it ready to share

And we’re off…

We knew we wanted to produce a video for the 2008 election but we were terrified of the expectations for our follow up to THIS LAND. Unfortunately, when you are a tiny company, there is no time for fear; you just have to DO IT!

Rather than try to “top” THIS LAND, which we knew would be impossible, our goal was to make the best video humanly possible without repeating ourselves. We didn’t know what the song would be but we knew we didn’t want to just have two candidates calling each other names – been there, done that!

On March 16th Gregg fired off the following email to Evan and the production officially began…

Once we have a direction we officially become slaves to the project…

Once an idea is in place we ask ourselves two questions: Does it make us laugh and do we love it enough to spend the coming weeks and months working around the clock on it? If the answer is yes to both then we start pounding away at it! Gregg will keep chipping away at the writing while Evan starts doing little doodles so that the written gags and the visual gags evolve together…

In order to escape constant emails and ringing phones of the office, we rented a crummy hotel room down the street to get an uninterrupted stretch of quiet time to compare notes. Gregg’s lyrics inform Evan’s visual gags and the visual gags Evan has come up with inspire Gregg to scrap old lyrics and write new ones. It is this iterative, brotherly collaboration that make JibJab videos special.

PS – While people might think we’re a big, spiffy internet company we’re still forced to rent the cheapest dump we can find! This place smelled pretty funky and Evan got a strange rash from using the towels…

Once the lyrics and initial visual concepts are fleshed the process opens up beyond the brothers. Evan works with the amazing internal and external artists at JibJab to start really fleshing outing the visual gags and storyboards. There are pages upon pages of drawing that get done at this stage. If you look closely some of these made it into the finished piece. Click an image to enlarge…

We like the bitter guy from Pennsylvania clinging to his gun and religion…

There were a thousand ways to illustrate the “swollen left gland”…

The McCostume had some great gags…

Here’s an alternate take on the opening with Rove pocketing the keys!

Here’s a pass at the final sequence with Hillary still in the running…

Once we start to feel comfortable with the lyrics, we will record a “scratch track”, which is an english term meaning “recording that will make your ears bleed because Evan and Gregg can’t sing”.

We use the scratch track for two purposes. First, we pull it into the computer and lay out our visual gags and storyboards against it to make sure the timing is working and identify any areas that may need new lyrics or new visuals. Second, to make sure we are 100% comfortable with the tempo/pace and lyrics before we go into a recording studio – which is insanely expensive!

In spite of the fact that this is HIGHLY EMBARRASSING material, we have decided to post the scratch track for your displeasure. Listen at your own risk…

Visual Development is where we create a bunch of art, not with the intention of actually putting it in the animation, but rather to get a sense for what the animation should FEEL like. Viz Dev begins at the very beginning of Pre-Production and continues to evolve throughout the making of the piece. Here’s some samples. Click to enlarge..

Hillary’s sequence was a mixture of lamenting what could have been and the aggression that was natural to her campaign…

The McCain sequence was all a cross between WWII poster art and Rambo!

For Obama the goal was clearly a complete and utter fantasy land – to be MORE Disney than Disney…

And it all had to pull together in the end…

With the lyrics nailed down and the storyboards 80% of the way there, we get to do the most fun part of the process: recording! Recording is so great because, unlike animation which takes weeks or months, we start in the morning with nothing and, by the end of the day, we have a polished piece of work.

On Monday, May 12 we were lucky enough to record with the maestro, John Frizzle! As we’d hoped, John crafted an epic track where each verse perfectly mirrored the character’s personality. With the help of Frederik Wiedmann rockin’ the control panels we feel like the music couldn’t have come out better!

Here’s Evan, John, Gregg and Jim once the day’s work was done…

Our MAGNIFICENT voice actors Jim Meskimen and Su Tien Wong! Jim has been our go-to guy for years now and can do just about any voice imaginable. In addition to acting and singing, Su is also a crazy talented animator working up at Pixar this summer…

John has all kinds of crazy equipment at his studio (plus he makes a mean bag of pop corn).  John, Gabriel Mann (the voice of Obama) and Gregg partake of some popped goodness…

An “animatic” can be thought of as the skeleton for the final animation. It is the first stage of combining the music, lyrics and visuals so we can make sure the gags and cuts are working before we start the heavy lifting (and expensive) process of producing artwork.

The animatics are the end product of the work Evan and Gregg do together in the dumpy motel room. It’s not until you see music, lyrics and gags together that you can make the ultimate judgment about what makes it in and what gets the boot.

Animatics typically don’t leave the studio because, as you can see, they are VERY rough! Only about half of the ideas made the cut from this pass on May 15th…

After the early animatic, we can identify scenes we KNOW will make it into the final animation and we can pass those scenes along for art production. With those scenes in motion, we keep chipping away at the holes. Here’s another pass from June 3. You can see some of the gags and timing start to take shape but it’s still not there yet…

By June 11th the animatic was more or less 100% locked down…

Over the past few years we have focused a lot of energy on taking our character animation to the next level. Sometimes simple, herky-jerky animation it’s perfect for the joke we are telling – like it was in ‘This Land’.

In ‘This Land’ we used the same marching dance over and over and over again. It worked because the underlying joke was that all of these politicians are the same. However, with ‘Time for Some Campaignin’ the goal was to highlight each candidates unique qualities and the way a character MOVES is another opportunity to showcase their personality.

Check out the differences between the two approaches…

One of the characters we were most excited to animate was Obama’s magical stead! However, we don’t just rush into animating – that could be disastrous. Before we do any actual animation we do what is called a “pencil test”. The pencil test gives us the opportunity to nail down every movement and make sure we are happy with it before beginning the time consuming animation process. Check out this pencil test next to some completed animation.

Once we’re happy with the rough motion we use our pencil test as a guide for clean up animation. Check out the magical stead brought to life…

One of the great misnomers about animation done on a computer is that the computer actually does the work. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It still takes an artist to make a decision about every pixel of every frame. The computer is just the piece of paper and the pencil. Here’s two examples of what it took to make our unicorn run. First is a breakdown of the assets and next is a screen grab from Flash, the software we animate in. An actual human designed and placed every one of those dots! Click to enlarge…

People sometimes ask us if we ‘trace’ our animation (meaning, do we pull a video into an animation program and trace the action frame-by-frame). The answer is no. However, we will often use live action reference video to get a feel for the character and his/her motion before we begin animating. Here is a shot of Evan acting out the George Bush opening animation prior to animation. Do we use fancy stuff here at JibJab? HECK NO! This was shot with the built in iChat camera on a Mac! (Aint’ technology great?)

With the acting reference as a guide, it becomes a lot easier to animate the action. You’ll notice that the acting and the animation don’t really “match” but share the same “feel”…

Animation is the most intense, grueling part of the process. Creating a few seconds of animation can take days. It is the dedication and love of the artform that drives our team through the long days and nights to bring this work to you!

We are obsessed with background art! In the eight and a half years since we started JibJab we have never produced a piece that is so chock full of amazing art! Our philosophy has always been to “love every pixel of every frame!” but our art team took it to a whole new level on this one!

Here is some production art that flies by too fast to be appreciated in the short. Click to enlarge…

A couple of nested goodies in Hillary’s Box-o-Tricks…

The goal was to keep the two environments completely different but still very connected…

Could you imagine being stuck in this thing…

How’s this for a study in contrasts….

Talk about a fantasy land! Click to enlarge…

You can’t even see it in the piece but there is a gorgeous painting of Washington DC at the bottom of the valley…

The guy in the middle is Tim, our Director of Operations! (You WISH you as manly as Tim!)…

This shot design perfectly complements the lyrics “Citizens gather from both far and near” with farms leading to cities leading to monuments…

We wanted the act of voting to feel as close to heaven as possible. This shot (and Obama’s unicorn) were inspired by Chuck Jones’ “What’s Opera Doc?”…

The grand finale was a nod to our earlier election video, ‘This Land’. We wanted all the players from both parties arm in arm on the White House lawn with the sun rising above them all. As much as we poke fun at all the silliness this is still the best darn country and political system in the world!!!

Now that we have outlined all the individual steps, we thought it would be fun to break down the last scene of the video to show you how it’s all connected. This is (literally) the money shot!

The very first task in visual development was figuring out exactly what the voting booth should feel like. As you can see, it evolved from Vegas flashing lights to majestic Greek architecture. Click to enlarge…

With the look and feel locked down, and a sense for how we wanted the scene to move, we ran a quick 3D test to make sure that the action worked before we dove into the weeds on the scene. This shot was entirely recreated with 2D software and cut outs once we were comfortable with the movement.

While the motion test was under way, we began building our model so that we could have giant stacks of money reaching up to the heavens. We photographed about 50 bucks scattered over a paper mache mound then cut and colored it in Photoshop. Look closely and you’ll see a lot of fake money in there too…

In addition to photographing the mountain of money, we also built a temporary set of stairs so that we could film what money would look like falling onto those stairs…

We filmed the money falling against a red sheet so we can use technology to extract just the dollars falling from the sky and then layer it in on top of the animation. This process is called “keying”. Here’s a clip of the film after the “keying” (or dropping out the red)…

Throwing money is fun! Here is a snapshot of our highly trained money throwers in action!

To get the characters to appear as if they are throwing the money requires a lot of small, complex movements. To do that in animation means you have to break the character into lots of symbols that can be moved independently of one another. Here are all the pieces that we used to pose and rigg up our characters and their money bags so they could be placed on the steps…

While the character animation was happening, we began to recreate the 3D camera move winding up the stairs. We used 2D cut out elements in after Adobe After Effects to create the illusion of 3D. This is one of the first attempts and we used temporary assets to help us figure out what kind of shapes we would need for the final pass…

With all the separate pieces in place, we layered all the background images and character animation into the After Effects file. There were about a BILLION layers in the file! Here’s what it looks like altogether before we add the final spit shine and lighting…

Finally, with the core fotage in place, we use Adobe After Effects to create the lighting effects and color correction that you see in the finished movie.

All that work for 3 1/2 seconds of magic!