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Getting Started with Sock Puppets

Well you did it. You downloaded Sock Puppets. Now you'll be losing some sleep and your mom will be yelling at you to put that iPad® thingy down and make yourself useful around the house. That's your problem though. We're just puppets. Puppets that can lip-synch to your voice and your friends' voices letting you make your own puppet shows and put them up on your Facebook® page or on YouTube™. Tell her we're educational and you're learning how to better interact with people. A necessary skill if you're ever going to have any shot at college or gainful employment. So let's get started, the garbage and dishes can wait. This is your future.

When you first launch Sock Puppets you'll see the home screen. You can browse the store for more puppets and features, open an existing puppet show if you've created at least one, or find out all about the good people who made this thing. But to get started just select NEW.

The first screen you'll see is the "Characters" selection screen. You can select up to four puppets by tapping on them. When a puppet is selected it will be marked with some nifty little eyeballs. You can always come back to this screen later and change puppets. Notice the pesky little advertisement at the top of the screen? It goes away anytime you purchase anything and never comes back. But for now let's just tap a puppet or two, then tap NEXT to move on.

The next screen is the "Backgrounds" selection screen, and you'll select them the same way as you did with the Characters. Select up to 5 of them and tap NEXT to move on to "Props and Scenery" (both of these screens are shown above). Move through the above three selection screens in this manner, and remember, you can always come back and switch stuff around if you change your mind.

Also, as you can see in the Props and Scenery image above there are different types of props and scenery. Some of them can be animated and some cannot. Others always appear in front of the characters and some can be moved behind and in front. As you experiment you'll see how versatile and fun these props are and how you can create some really amazing puppet shows to share with your friends. But now on to the good stuff, so let's hit NEXT again.

Above you can see the stage with two puppets, a prop and a background loaded. Notice that the puppet on the right has a red arrow over her head. This is the puppet that will lip-synch to your voice or a friend's voice once you hit the record button. While you are recording you can switch to a different puppet and that puppet will begin to lip-synch. You can record for up to 30 seconds.

Here is some more info about the controls you'll see in Sock Puppets. This probably seems obvious but lets go through it anyway. The RECORD and STOP buttons just record and stop. PLAY just plays back what you've just recorded, and HOME goes back to the very first screen. Now here's the good stuff. SAVE lets you save the animation on your iPod®, iPhone®, or iPad®, and SHARE lets you upload your awesome creation to Facebook and/or YouTube. The BACK button lets you swap out stuff if you've changed your mind. Sweet! But what are those funky buttons on the right side of the screen?

Well, if you have multiple backgrounds selected, they will be loaded in the order you selected them in. So for each of these buttons there is a different background picture. You can use up to five backgrounds. And.... are you ready for this?.... they can be switched while you are recording just by tapping these buttons. So your puppets can go from room to room, or from the farm to outer space!

SHARING

So now you want to share your weird little Sock Puppet show with your friends? Here are the details, although you can probably figure this stuff out. First you need to have a saved show or have just recorded something. Once that happens the SHARE button will be active. Tap on it! You'll see the following screen:

Tap the FACEBOOK button.
The login screen looks pretty familiar unless you've been living in a cave without connectivity for the past couple of years. But then again, how would you be reading this...

You'll need to enter your Facebook and/or YouTube accounts the first time you try to share but after that, your login information is saved. Oh, and on Facebook, you'll need to give us permission to upload to your account. Should you decide to use a different account for either or both you can tap the RESET ACCOUNTS button and it will clear your login information. The CANCEL button simply goes back to the Previous screen.

GETTING MORE PUPPETS AND STUFF

How's about you tap the store button—really, just check it out. You'll see a bunch of icons there and if you tap on one of them, you'll get an info screen like this one:

This particular item is the content pass. That means if you buy it, you get all of the content we release for one low price, and NO MORE ADS. Done and done. Right now there are three additional packages of puppets. We plan on releasing about 5 or 6 packages total and then we figure we'll be puppeted out. But even if we never did another thing, the content pass is the way to go. It's already more puppets than any one human should be allowed to have. Features such as the ability to record up to 90 second puppet shows instead of the 30 seconds are not included.

So, that's all you should need to know to get started. Thank you for downloading Sock Puppets and we hope you get hours of fun and enjoyment out of it!