Facejobs is MAYA’s first ever kids and creativity application.
Facejobs is another entry in MAYA’s “design a fun wearable computing accessory in 24-hours because you really don’t want to work on Friday especially if Apple is launching a game-changing new product on Saturday Morning” market.
Read on to figure out what the heck this app does!
When I was a kid, I dreamed of one day being a big time puppet master.
The Muppets on Sesame Street were enthralling, Danny O’Day and Farfel where my favorite friends and I would spend hours practicing ventriloquism in front of a mirror until I could throw my voice like Jimmy Nelson.
I went through a period where I think I wanted to be some sort of magician puppet myself, at one point giving myself a face job by painting lines on my face and coloring my cheeks to look just like a ventriloquist dummy. I would blink dramatically with a wooden expression on my face and every once in a while break from character to wink at the audience.
I wore a magician’s hat and had a magic wand and probably tortured my friends and family with what I thought were pretty amazing illusions (I really can’t explain this part, except to say that maybe it was during the time that Bill Bixby was solving crimes in Las Vegas each week while creating master illusions himself).
Something about role-playing and imagination and magic and a chance to make something strange and new took hold of me at that point and I don’t think I’ve ever looked back.
We at MAYA think this act of creating something new is important to learn when you are young. It turns on some new place in a young child’s mind and they begin to understand that they aren’t just consumers, but makers, tellers of stories, detectives learning how to imagine how other people think and live and trying to walk a mile in their shoes. If only for a moment you realize that you can surprise and delight others, that you can change things with a touch of magic.
Of course kids these days are drawn towards the mobile devices and streaming content of a new era (I’m sure if the iPhone was out when I was a kid I would have thrown away my “Merlin” hand-held wonder device in a moment, tossed aside my “Odyssey video gaming station,” and jumped at the chance to get my hands on something so magical.) So we thought it’d be fun to come up with a do-it-yourself puppeteering application so kids could have something new to tell stories and surprise their families and friends. Along the way we realized this could also be a fun mask for not only kids but everyone, to quickly give yourself a facejob at your next party.
Introducing version 1.0 of Facejobs, the ultimate puppet-master!
Click here to go to the app store and download it now!
This is all an experiment but we’ve started out by including a cute sock puppet and a few of our faces that you can load if you’re connected to the network. You can choose from a pre-made face from the list below or use the sock-puppet and then put on a show!
Hold the iPad in front of your own face and you’ll have an instant animated Halloween mask. Imagine loading up a silly face and surprising your friends at your next party (this image shows what it’d look like if your sister decided to be a baby, which is probably nothing new if she’s anything like my sister)!
If you hold your finger on the screen for five seconds, you’ll see a menu that will let you load any image from your iPhoto library into the background scene, or load your own pictures from your iPhoto library.
You can take pictures of your kid making open/close faces and then turn them into a puppet.
Even draw puppets and take pictures with your iphone and once they’re in your iPhoto library you can load those in as well. Although this takes a bit of work, it’s worth it and a fun activity for a bunch of kids on a Saturday afternoon.
First draw a puppet looking straight forward with its mouth closed. Then draw another picture with the mouth open. Then do a mouth closed and mouth open picture while the puppet is looking up, looking down, and looking left and right.
Now, use a camera or an iphone to take a picture of each picture. Sync your iphone to your iPhoto library on your computer. Now sync your iPad so the pictures are on the iPad (as soon as the iPad has its own camera this will be quite a bit easier).
Now start up the facejobs app and hold your finger on the screen for 5 seconds. Choose “Edit Face” and start selecting each of the pictures to build your puppet!
Each picture you load will replace part of the standard sock puppet with your new picture.
To delete the faces you’ve loaded in and return to the standard sock puppet, just choose “Delete face” from the main menu.
You can also load a new face from our list of faces (below), or delete the face you have and revert back to the original puppet.
The first sample faces you can try include:
Doodle (a hand drawn puppet)
Dutch-elf (a kinda scary face)
Matt (a suave rogue)
and Owen (a cute baby from our offices…)
Just select “Load Face” from the menu, and type in one of the names above to load up some pre-made facejobs!
More real faces and other whimsical characters are coming soon!
This app is built to take advantage of the new iPad for big screen fun but will also work great with an iPhone or iTouch.
Use it with friends who have iPads, iPhones or iTouches and put on a show (ok, now I’m channeling the “Little Rascals.”)
When you tilt your hand left the puppet looks left, when you tilt it right the puppet looks right, when you tilt it up or down it’ll make silly faces. If you talk out loud the puppet will open and close its mouth in sync with your voice.
Give your kids a little face time.
Contact us for support or to suggest new features.
Want to learn more or be added to our Facejobs mailing list (to find out about iPad holders for puppeteering or learn when new features are available)? Contact Susan Salis, or send us a note via our Contact Form.
Keep an eye out for new developments on this page. Some up and coming features we’ve been considering include:
- How-To instructions on how to build your own mini-stage and sock-puppet style iPad holder.
- New hand-made sock-puppets
- The ability to distort and blend two different faces into one puppet… ever wonder what your sister and your pet cat would look like as a puppet?
- Facejobs with twitter integration (network connection required)! Send tweets to your face to create automatic thought balloons!
- Advanced Puppet-master controls so you can use a secondary iPhone to change faces on-the-fly, and control facial movements or expressions wirelessly (network connection required)
- Use multiple iPhones as marionette rigs and perform complex full body performances that are played out with virtual props that are only viewable on a wirelessly connected iPad. We call this new feature, MasterPad Theater.
