App of the Week: Shadow Puppet

Title: Shadow Puppet
Cost: Free
Platform: iOS

Shadow Puppet is a great new iOS app that has uses for both teens and librarians. The app, which has versions for iPhones and iPads, makes it easy to create slide shows of your pictures and add a soundtrack or voiceover to the resulting video. You can either take new pictures from within the Shadow Puppet app or load one or more images from your device’s camera roll. Once you have selected images, you can rearrange their order and then record an audio track with the click of a button.

While recording the audio you can navigate between images by clicking the arrow button, zoom in or out on the image by pinching and stretching, or direct the viewer’s attention to a specific part of the image by tapping on it, which will result in a small pointer on that part of the image. There is no limit on the length of the audio that you can record to go with your slideshow, though the app will prompt you to move to the next image every 15 seconds, based on their own view of best practices. You can ignore this advice, but it is a helpful tool for pacing your presentation. The entire process is very intuitive, but the app also includes a brief tutorial that you can review at any time.

Once you have created your slideshow and audio track, you can share it via email, Facebook, Twitter or the Shadow Puppet site. You can also save it to your device’s camera roll as a video file, which makes it easy to upload the resulting video to your preferred video sharing site. Each Shadow Puppet also has a unique URL on the Shadow Puppet website, which you can share via any other means, and custom embed code that can be used to embed it elsewhere on the web. The app will also notify you when your Shadow Puppet is viewed, including an optional pop up alert when people view a Shadow Puppet you have shared with them.

This is a fun app that could be used in a wide variety of ways from creating a narrated vacation slideshow for friends to creating a brief tutorial on a craft project to creating a walk through of a new game or app. I would definitely recommend giving it a try.

For more app recommendations visit the YALSA App of the Week Archive. If you have an app you think we should review, let us know!