| Transmorphs |
There is a great program called Morpher for doing image distortion. You can take one picture and "morph" this into a second picture. The most primititve way of doing this is to do a fade. That is, as you progress from one picture to the next each pixel slowly changes color from the color it is in the first image to the color it is in the last image. That's fine for a transition in a film, but the halfway shots aren't very interesting. Just a kind of half-there for each picture. Morphing is a little more than that.
The additional information you provide for Morpher is to identify points in the first picture to be associated with points in the second picture. For example, if you were morphing between my face and a llama, you might pick the center points of the eyes, the corners of the mouth, points along the hairline, and other visually important features. Unless the llama and I have a very similar face the distance between our eyes, for example, will be different. So, when a morph does a transition, in addition to the fade, it also does a distort. The distort is important for the halfway pictures. Essentially it moves each point you pick from the starting position to the ending position (and all the nearby points) across the duration of the morph. So, for example, at the halfway point, not only will the eyes be a color halfway between my eyes and the llama's eyes, but they will also be in a position halfway between where mine are and the llama's are. Cool, huh?
The upshot of all that is that as an image morphs, it seems to twist and distort from the original shape into second shape. This makes the halfway images very funny indeed. What would I look like as a half-Jo and half-Llama?
The last little trick this tool can do is a pure distort. This is the same as a morph, but without the fade. So, in the Jo to Llama example, when we finished the process, all of my bits would be in the position of a llama's, but they would still look like me. Too freaky.
What follows are a number of pictures I made with my friends. And I mean with my friends!
 |
 |
TANYA TO WILLOW
|
My partner in crime, Tanya, and I were making Buffy Vids for Selkie Productions/Sopwith Llama. For the intro titles we decided to do morphs between the various Buffy characters and our faces. Hers came out much better than mine. Here is the morph from her to Willow. |
|
|
BUFFY TO TANYA
|
This is the follow on morphing Buffy to Tanya. |
|
|
WHAT IF YOUR GIRLFRIEND LOOKED LIKE BARBIE?
|
You hear all this talk about Barbie being a distorted version of the female form. I had always looked at her and thought she really wasn't that bad. But to put this nieve philosophy to the test I did a morph between her and a woman I found just as attractive. Well, as you can see, when painted in real form, Barbie really is a crazed distorted mutant! |
|
|
WHAT IF BARBIE LOOKED LIKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND?
|
Of course having done one, the reverse was also a bruning issue. It turns out that we're so used to seeing Barbie as her impossibly wasp waisted self, when she is drawn at the porportions of a normal human, she looks obesce! Gosh, isn't it interesting how media distorts our perception of what is normal? |
|
|
SIMPLE MORPH
|
Just to complete the set here is a normal morph between the two pictures. |
|
|
ANIME CHICKS
|
After postulating the barbie question, I began to wonder about all the cartoons we see. So I picked a character (Misato) from a series (Evangelion) drawn in what I thought was a reasonably naturalistic style (nieve me) and tried the same trick. Well, I should have known, but when the character was morphed to the profile of a normal person, and vice versa, the differences were quite clear! |
