Sponsored Feature: MouthOff gives your iPhone extra bite
Talk to the iPhone
The reason the iPhone has captured the gaming world’s attention so energetically is the scope of possibilities it offers the imaginative developer. There are so many weird and wonderful ideas floating around out there, with no real platform for people to display them on.
Creating a quirky, entertaining, viral abstraction on the PSP, for example, is completely unfeasible, since the cost of development, production and distribution would put a developer in the red overnight. The iPhone, however, means those impish ideas bouncing around inside the skulls of mischievous designers and programmers – like those at iPhone digital design studio, ustwo – have a viable outlet.
Its latest application, MouthOff, is currently taking the App Store by storm, and ensuring iPhone users are – quite literally - struggling to keep a straight face.
“We'd just spent a gruelling three months developing our other iPhone game Steppin, a graphically rich finger racing game,” explains ustwo’s creative director Matt Miller (or Mills, as he prefers). “It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears so we wanted to offset this with an app at the opposite end of the spectrum - a quick turnaround app that could engage with the mass market. Something that would be a joy for us to develop, and that was so fun people just needed to spend that 59p/0.99$ to get it!”
That application was MouthOff, and we don’t mind saying this is one of those essentially pointless frivolities that in fact gets more use on people’s iPhones than the calendar or weather apps.
MouthOff is packed with a variety of animated mouths, which react to the sound of the user's voice in real-time. “But why?” you might well ask through a set of sharpened lizard teeth with a flailing forked tongue lashing between them.
“It’s all about fun, fun, fun – having a laugh with your mates, and making people giggle in any situation,” continues Mills. "It's simple but very iconic. A mouth animating in front of your face can be very recognizable! We love the idea that a MouthOff could be whipped out in a business meeting and used to add a bit of humour to a table of suits, or used to propose marriage, to entertain bored kids on a rainy Sunday, to give a speech, give an interview and much more! It’s not to be taken too seriously, but we wanted to create an app that would stay on the iPhone, and that would attract kids and adults alike.”
Although we weren’t speaking in person, we feel pretty sure Mills was talking to us through a jaw full of pretend gold teeth.
In fact, he raises a very good point when it comes to the App Store. For the most part we tend to split the App Store in two – games and applications. And for the most part it’s easy to see why. But every so often, as with MouthOff, the distinction isn’t so clear. Here we have an application designed for fun, but without any specific gaming objective, making this one if the more unique curiosities of the App Store that doesn’t really fit into either category, yet perfectly suitable for both.
“The build of MouthOff is simple, it's not rocket science,” explains Paola Sandrinelli, ustwo's developer of MouthOff. “It's basically eight frames of animation that sync to volume. The most difficult part was getting the right balance of sound reaction – too little and it didn’t respond at all, too much and it would start jabbing at the lowest sound.”
The mouths included in MouthOff were all created by illustrator Neil McFarland, aka Paris Hair, and include rich, cartoony designs that are remarkably believable when you see someone actually holding a MouthOff iPhone in front of their face. The only real giveaway is the clear smirk that’s going on behind the handset, though that’s almost impossible to avoid.
The app has been growing in popularity day by day, with more and more YouTube videos and Flickr galleries constantly appearing as people fail to resist the hilarious charms of this wonderfully ridiculous application. Ustwo is encouraging users to make videos of themselves using MouthOff and upload them to YouTube with the tag “showusyourmouthoff”, so make sure to add yourself to the mouthy fraternity and your own comical natterings will feature on the MouthOff site.
“It’s really starting to take off now, as the awareness gets out,” explains Mills. “The next few weeks are big. Kids have just starting making videos and reviewing the app which is excellent – we've just realised that the kids are the future of this app! We're loving this guy, so cute! The app was picked up by the BBC in the UK, and also design magazine Creative Review gave it app of the day. It's been really great having the app tied into YouTube for our website, as it really helps spread the word. It gives the app much more exposure. We're just waiting for Oprah to use it on her show now – that would be the ultimate!”
It’d make her show far more watchable, that’s for sure. The Six O’clock News, or Prime Minister’s Question Time might be considerably less depressing if the presenters and panellists were equipped with MouthOff, too.
Fans of the zany app will be glad to hear another five new mouth animations are currently going through Apple’s approval system and should be with us pretty soon. But what’s next after such a bizarrely successful expedition into surreal software?
“We've been busy working on client iPhone apps (paid work!) but we're working on our next iPhone project with one of our favourite illustrators, Jon Burgerman,” Mills concludes. “We're starting a weekly blog soon that will chart the development of the app from start to finish. It should be really interesting for wannabe developers, plus Burgerman is one of the most exciting names in illustration right now.”
You can check out Jon’s work right here, and don’t forget to swing by the official MouthOff webpage to see the hilarious speechifying of a world of smirking iPhone users.
