A couple months ago Joshua Griffin posted a big, yellow smiley face they used for a teaching series at Saddleback. I looked at it and thought it could work great for another personality for youth group video announcements since it works very similarly to our good friend, L.T.

Basically, use your computer’s microphone to talk while using the keys on your computer to control the smiley face. A screen capture program will allow you to record a video from your audio and smiley face together, just how we discussed with the jib-jab effect tutorial. (See that post for screen capture software suggestions.) Upload the video announcement to your youth group’s Facebook page and, wa-la, you’ve created an engaging, creative and fun announcement in under 5 minutes.

Here are the controls for using Big, Yellow Smiley:

• Mouse – controls eye movement (click and drag to move)
• Q through O – controls the eyes
• A through G – controls moving mouths (hold to make mouth move)
• Z through B – controls static mouths (hold to make them stay on the screen)
• Space Bar – controls talking mouth (hold to talk)

View Smiley full-screen in your browser (right-click and “Save as…” to download)

[ht Dennis Poulette]

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For LIVE YM Talk this Monday, November 23, Brad Cooper is our featured guest. As the youth pastor at Perry Noble’s church, Newspring Community Church, he will lead us in a discussion about leading a team of volunteer youth workers. We’d love to have you join us for the live conversation at 2:00 PM eastern time! See our LIVE YM Talk page for details.

• Easy JibJab effect for youth group video announcements
• Freebie Friday #157: Custom countdown timer video on a green-screen
• How to make fun video announcements in 3 easy steps
• Freebie Friday #111: Youth group news video intro
• Why I don’t make announcements at youth group