Greeting cards are boring. Seriously, have you ever gone shopping for a birthday or Christmas card for a loved one, only to come away empty-handed and deeply disappointed by the selection of samey, cloyingly sentimental garbage on offer? Enter MotionPortrait Inc’s ZombieMe (out now, free), a new app that allows you to use your iPhone’s camera roll photos to quickly and easily create personalized video greeting cards featuring dancing zombie versions of you, your friends, and/or family.
As I say, creating a video greeting card with ZombieMe is remarkably straightforward. You simply paste a few portrait pics from your library onto zombie bodies, choose a background, then add a personal message like “Hello” or “Happy Birthday,” and you’re good to go.
The end result, a short video clip of a dance troupe made up of zombified doppelgängers of you and your loved ones shuffling and shimmying along to a jaunty, Michael Jackson-esque backing track, is as hilarious as you might imagine — and looks pretty professionally done to boot. Having never tried any of MotionPortrait’s apps before, I was particularly impressed by the technical wizardry that modifies and animates the zombie dancer’s faces, making them do delightfully creepy stuff like wink, smile, and scowl.
My only real gripe with ZombieMe is that a lot of its coolest and most useful personalization options — such as background templates, funny headgear for zombies, and even some commonly used greeting card messages like “Congratulations” and “Merry Christmas” — are locked behind IAP paywalls. That said, this free version does give you a good taste of what the app has to offer, and the IAPs are quite reasonably priced, so ZombieMe is definitely still worth a look.
Verdict
Your mileage may vary, but personally I found ZombieMe to be hugely amusing and technically impressive. I can definitely see myself busting out this app the next time a loved one is celebrating a birthday or anniversary.