Rebecca Black's "Friday" Parody (2011)
On March 31 of 2011, Robbie and long-time friend and fellow JibJab coworker, Dave Bergmann, collaborated on a project as part of "JibJab:Lab 2011." The idea was to ignore all real work and work on anything else for two days, with a final presentation at the beginning of the next week. Rebecca Black's song, "Friday," had become on internet sensation a few weeks earlier due to it's expensive production value and extremely juvenille (ie. not-so-great) lyrics. Click here to see the original video. Robbie and Dave became obsessed with the video and decided to do their own version. King Diamond is, who Dave calls, "the Freddie Mercury of '80's metal" and his style seemed appropriate for the parody. The two would construct and animate puppets and record their own version metal version of the song. After the initial two days, the puppets were created and shot in front of green screen. So they spent the rest of the weekend working on the music and animation. The final render was finished just minutes before the presentation. Robbie and Dave were the last to show their work and it was as epic an ending to JibJab:Lab as could be: with the music cranked up to 11, a speaker fell and shatterred a glass vase halfway through the video. Rock!
