Every year that Christmas rolls around, there’s one app that seems to appear in my WhatsApp chats, social media feeds, and lists of recommended apps. It’s ElfYourself, and it’s guaranteed to inject a high dose of silliness into your festive celebrations.
For 14 years running, ElfYourself has let you star in up to 27 personalized videos with your face on dancing elves. Sound silly? That’s because it is!
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This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
Beyond creating funny elf videos, the app lets you share your dancing skills with your friends and family on messaging apps or on social media. You can even add a holiday greeting to your creations. Let me walk you through its features and why I think you should give it a go, as well as one disclaimer to be aware of.
Make it your own
The crazy elf experience all begins by using your camera or camera roll to add up to five faces to the app’s library. That means you can have fun with up to four friends, or if you don’t mind the look of your own appearance, then why not add five photos of your own face!
Before you crack on with adding your photo, it’s worth noting that the app has a pretty long legal disclaimer, which, in my opinion, includes some pretty clumsy language. Just give it a read first and make sure you’re happy with what they might do with your photo before you get into all the fun.
Back to the app. Once you’ve uploaded your photo, it can be adjusted to make sure it fits perfectly into the elf face. That’s as simple as pinching to zoom, turning to rotate, and dragging to remove. You’ll need to center your face and line up your mouth with the designated line.
There’s also a ‘My Faces’ library, which is populated with up to 20 of your previously uploaded photos. This makes it quick and easy to jump straight into the app without going through the process of photographing your face each time.
Time to dance
With your photograph(s) added, it’s time to enter your movie star self in one of 27 dances. They are fantastically choreographed, seamlessly edited, and above all, incredibly humorous. Just scroll through the options, and you’ll see the preview generated instantly.
Each dance video includes ‘sticker’ descriptions to tell you whether they are free to share or paid-for content. This helps you access the content that fits within the amount of money you want to spend.
Some of the videos can also be personalized with AI. That includes options to change styles to Americana, 50s, Parisian, and more. This additional level of flexibility means you can make the videos more personal rather than letting the app dictate it all.
Share the fun
With your video generated and personalized, you’re now ready to share it. This is where you can make the whole experience a shared one. Impress your friends and let them join in with the laughter. The app taps into your phone’s default sharing options, so the interface will no doubt be familiar to you.
If you don’t want to part with any money, then you can only share videos that are marked as ‘free’. All other videos cost $5.99/£5.99 to share, although that is the same price as a 12-month season pass, which means it always makes sense to go for the latter.
Once you’ve had a little bit of fun, you might close the app and choose to return to it later. Thankfully, ElfYourself stores all the dances you have created locally on the device. That means you can go back to them at any time, edit, and share them around.
So, if you feel like you’d like to inject some serious hilarity into your festive season, why not download ElfYourself on iOS or Android.
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paulo.n.hatton@gmail.com (Paul Hatton)
