Monday, December 10, 2007

Ladies and Gentlemen, The GritCity Dancers


So many people had so much fun earlier this year with the "Simpsonize Me" post, that I thought I would do a short post on this little piece of animated holiday cheer. My sister sent me a version with her family and I immediately created one with my own.

Using a concept similar to the Simpsons site, this asks you to upload a photo of yourself in order to create the piece. But rather than turn you into a cartoon you instead become an elf. An elf with some serious moves.

Rather than subject you to my own visage, I thought I would abscond with the holiday cheer photo the Grit City bloggers used in their Thanksgiving post. Within a few quick moments I had the quartet dancing their little elf hearts out.

The site, sponsored by OfficeMax, is called Elf Yourself and if you have photos easily accessible from your computer it is easy to load, scale, rotate, shape and save the image for enjoyment.

The ease of use on the Elf Yourself site was much different than the experience I had from the animation "Have it Your Way" software from the earlier post. Whereas that site was difficult to connect to and took several minutes to load, if it loaded at all, this activity took little time and I had emailed out a version to my wife in minutes. (with my kids and my faces, not the Grit version.)

Mind you, since this is viral marketing, it could slow down from overuse as the emails start flying around. However as of this morning it was fine.



Without further ado, put your Reindeer hooves and snow mittens together for the Grit City Elf Dancers!!!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Droid116 said...

Yes, LOL, well thank you Anonymous for that very disturbing example of another site that will upload your photo for you.

Now that I have seen myself on "Dance off, pants off", I am rethinking this this whole genre of software.

The Napster said...

Hilarious site. I see that you are utilizing justice in a virtual community by moderating comments... It works!!! Thanks for an awesome class!

yogi said...

It really is viral - in my mind it's similar to chain mail spam we've all received. You know, the "mail this to five people in the next 10 minutes or you will die a slow painful death" emails. I'm not sure how effective the marketing has been though. Sure, the link has probably been sent around a few million times, but other than a small OfficeMax logo in the corner, there isn't much going for them. Of course there's nothing wrong with creating a little holiday cheer.

OfficeMax clearly wasn't ready for this type of response. Everyone that I've heard about this from has mentioned having problems getting onto the site itself (I'm experiencing it right now). They underestimated the amount of traffic they'd get. I don't think this is the last of these types of sites we'll see.

I think it's funny that they don't give you an option to choose the elf's gender (if only creating one).

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