Election 2008!

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

A Peek Behind the Curtain!

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…


It Starts with an Idea!

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…

It’s a Go!

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…

crummy scans from the sketch book

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…

Gags and Boards!

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…

Cover Your Ears!

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

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…

The Unkown…

So a few weeks into production we still didn’t know if Senator Clinton was in it for the long haul or not! In order to compensate we wrote two versions of her verse and the goal was to save production on her scene until the end. Right before the recording session we decided to roll the dice and gamble that she wouldn’t stick around. We were right. Here’s the lyrics that could have been…

Recording Session

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…

Animatics

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…