It is Time to Elf Yourself Again

Apparently, if I did the search right, it has been two years since anyone here on Associated Content told you to go Elf Yourself. So this is just to let you all know that this year they have a fun free snowball fight over there. You upload a photo of your face or that of a pet or in my case the drawing of the head of a cartoon cat, and then the Elf Yourself website gives you tools to manipulate the graphics so that they fit into their animated sequence.

If you do not like snowball fights, there are other themes to choose:

www.elfyourself.com/

I could show you the one I made, but it would be more fun if you made your own.

Elf Yourself is powered by JibJab, but Office Max is sponsoring the free service, whereas some of options on JibJab's site are fee-based and therefore require an account.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to use Elf Yourself, but it does take a little time to set up your first animation. The main page takes you to a screen where you can upload your photo and adjust it to fit the head of one of the elves. Since the characters mouth words, you will be prompted to make adjustments to the mouth so that it is lined up right for the animation. You can make up to five elves and it is acceptable to use the same photo for more than one character. After your finish, you can view and make adjustments, then send it to all your friends. Some of them will bite and elf themselves too, and send you back what they created.

You can grab photos from your Facebook application or upload them from your computer. You can also click a link to send your creation to Twitter for sharing. There will be a one-screen commercial at the end showing what it would look like to have your elves put on a beverage mug, ornament, or mousepad. They can even make greeting cards out of your design. But if you have good sales resistance, you can also just enjoy the animation for free.

So if you already got the link in an e-mail, great, but if not you can click on the link above. Please note that there is a 2MB limit on the size of your photo and that you need to have Flash installed to Elf Yourself. I hope lots of people will participate and also if you know of other free services of this kind, please leave a comment and a short description so that we can all play.