I invented iPhone X Animoji Karaoke You’re welcome, world

As I used a pre-release iPhone X this week, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be fun to lip-sync a song to an Animoji and have it mimic my performance. I dubbed the idea “Animoji Karaoke” and have been filling my Twitter feed with it. Judging from my likes, retweets, and comments, I haven’t just been entertaining myself; some people said that it redeemed Animoji or justifed buying a thousand-dollar phone. Even cynics have taken notice of my breakthrough.

Both Mashable and The Verge have done stories on the idea, crediting me. And now that the iPhone X is on sale, other folks are creating their own clips and sharing them on Twitter. There’s even an @animojikaraoke Twitter feed, which I wish I had thought of first.

More Animoji Karaoke for you. pic.twitter.com/pxvxfCUTi2

— Harry McCracken ???????? (@harrymccracken) November 2, 2017

A few tips, should you choose to provide one of your new Animoji pals with your own dulcet tones:

• After you’ve sent somebody an Animoji, you can use iOS’s standard sharing feature to save it as a video to your camera roll, thereby making it possible to upload it to Twitter and other venues.
• To break through the Animoji feature’s 10-second limit, don’t record yourself inside the Messages app; instead, use iOS 11’s new screen-recording feature, which would even let you perform “Bohemian Rhapsody” in its entirety.
• I brought two iPhone X videos into iMovie on a Mac to create my bunny-and-chicken duets. (Someone else has created the first Animoji quartet, and I have no idea how he did it).
• You can record your soundtrack with the iPhone X’s microphone as you lip-sync, but I also used iMovie to lay in a higher-fidelity version of the audio, and lined it up with my lip movements in post-production.