Chronicle your life in caricatures

Most of us have seen images of comic figures and caricatures springing up on Facebook wherein fellow social network buddies and acquaintances have made cartoons and animated versions of themselves and posted or shared on their walls.

While there is a lot of software and apps which can aid in caricature and animation creation one of the most popular and commonly used is Bitstrips.

Bitstrips is a leading mobile and web app which enables users create cartoons and animated characters of themselves and their extended social network buddies. The app allows users to configure and manipulate the physical features and tweak personal visual characteristics of an image and thus create an animated avatar.

The users can thus pretty much make a comic strip out of the characters created by designing sketches of friends, family and by putting them in a library of over 10,000 varied situations or scenarios. The caricatures may end up in funny and comical situations or on greeting cards, or in small animated video clips or even as status updates on social media.

The resultant comic strip can be posted on the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or shared in emails, text messages on apps such as WhatsApp or WeChat. The objective of Bitstrips is obviously to add some visual fun and frolic to content and make the interactions more personalized, funny and cool!

Toronto based Bitstrips which seems like an overnight sensation with the app maker’s comic vignettes spread all over the social media, has traversed a long and winding path to success. Jacob Blackstock (nicknamed BA) who used to express and chronicle his life through comics in an almost derisive and mocking manner used to share and niggle his school buddy Shahan Panth with his sketches and comic strips on real-life situations.

The duo floated Bitstrips in 2007 with the mission to give a visual entertaining communication platform to the people with BA as the CEO and Creative Director, Shahan overseeing the Marketing function and David Kennedy leading the product development. The free downloadable mobile app caught the fancy of the people on account of its ease of use with anyone with a smartphone or laptop being able to quickly chronicle themselves in thousands of comic scenes and the ability to create customised captions.

Some of the other common apps used to have similar fun includes ToonDoo in which is a cartoon strip creator, Comic Life, toolnet which helps create a “web comics” from a cellphone or laptop, Comiqs which is a free online service that allows you to create your own comics with your own photos, Geek And Poke, Stripgenerator, Stripcreator.com which features artwork and characters creation, Comic Strip Generator which is a custom cartoon maker with a library of 750 plus toon choices, Pixton, Knicket and Kerpoof.

Bitstrips launched its Facebook application in December 2012 while its mobile app for the iPhone and Android was released in September 2013. As on date with app is used across 90 countries all over the world and was rated was the “Trendiest app of 2013” by Google.

The application which is believed to have crossed 10 million downloads and boasts of a gallery of about 50 Mn cartoons, is undoubtedly a fun tool and has ushered in a completely new and revolutionary medium of self-expression!

prashant.vadgaonkar@hotmail.com