Morphing is a
special effectThe illusions used in the film, television, theater, or entertainment industries to simulate the imagined events in a story are traditionally called special effects ....
in
motion picturesFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
and
animationAnimation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways...
s that changes (or morphs) one
imageAn image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person....
into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence. Traditionally such a depiction would be achieved through cross-fading techniques on film. Since the early 1990s, this has been replaced by computer software to create more realistic transitions.
Later more sophisticated cross-fading techniques were employed that vignetted different parts of one image to the other gradually instead of transitioning the entire image at once.
Morphing is a
special effectThe illusions used in the film, television, theater, or entertainment industries to simulate the imagined events in a story are traditionally called special effects ....
in
motion picturesFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
and
animationAnimation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways...
s that changes (or morphs) one
imageAn image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person....
into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence. Traditionally such a depiction would be achieved through cross-fading techniques on film. Since the early 1990s, this has been replaced by computer software to create more realistic transitions.
Later morphing techniques
Later more sophisticated cross-fading techniques were employed that vignetted different parts of one image to the other gradually instead of transitioning the entire image at once. This style of morphing was perhaps most famously employed in the video that former
10cc10cc is an English art rock band who achieved their greatest commercial success in the 1970s. Initially comprising four musicians — Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme — who had written and recorded together for some three years, before assuming the “10cc” name in 1972.Two...
members
Kevin GodleyKevin Godley is a British musician and music video director.He was born in a family of Jewish descent, and went to North Cestrian Grammar School in Altrincham....
and
Lol CremeLol Creme is an English musician and music video director. He sings, plays guitar and keyboards....
(performing as
Godley & CremeGodley & Creme was an English pop music duo comprising Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. The pair began releasing albums as a duo after splitting from the pop band 10cc. In 1979 they directed their first Music Video for themselves "An Englishman in New York"...
) produced in 1985 for their song
Cry"Cry" is a song released by the British music duo Godley & Creme in 1985. It was included on the duo's album The History Mix Volume 1.The song peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, becoming Godley & Creme's lone Top 40 hit in the US apart from their former band, 10cc...
. It comprised a series of black and white close-up shots of faces of many different people that gradually faded from one to the next. In a strict sense, this had little to do with modern-day computer generated morphing effects, since it was merely a
dissolveIn film editing, a dissolve is a gradual transition from one image to another. In film, this effect is created by controlled double exposure from frame to frame; transiting from the end of one clip to the beginning of another....
using fully analogue equipment.
Modern morphing
In the early 1990s computer techniques that often produced more convincing results began to be widely used. These involved distorting one image at the same time that it faded into another through marking corresponding points and vectors on the "before" and "after" images used in the morph. For example, one would morph one face into another by marking key points on the first face, such as the contour of the nose or location of an eye, and mark where these same points existed on the second face. The computer would then distort the first face to have the shape of the second face at the same time that it faded the two faces.
Examples of morphing
Though
The Golden ChildThe Golden Child is a 1986 American mystical comedy film starring Eddie Murphy. Murphy plays Chandler Jarrell, a social worker who is confronted by a young Asian woman , who tells him that he is the Chosen One destined to save The Golden Child, the saviour of all mankind, from the clutches of the...
implemented very crude morphing effects from animal to human and back, the first movie to employ detailed morphing was
WillowWillow is a 1988 fantasy adventure film directed by Ron Howard and produced/co-written by George Lucas. Warwick Davis stars in the film, as well as Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Jean Marsh and Patricia Hayes...
, in 1988. A similar process was used a year later in
Indiana Jones and the Last CrusadeIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a 1989 adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg, from a story co-written by executive producer George Lucas. It is the third film in the Indiana Jones franchise. Harrison Ford reprises the title role and Sean Connery plays Indiana's father, Henry Jones, Sr...
to create Walter Donovan's gruesome demise. Both effects were created by
Industrial Light and MagicIndustrial Light & Magic is an Academy Award winning motion picture visual effects company that was founded in May 1975 by George Lucas and is owned by Lucasfilm. Lucas created the company when he discovered that the special effects department at 20th Century Fox was shut down after he was given...
using grid
warpingImage warping is the process of digitally manipulating an image such that any shapes portrayed in the image have been significantly distorted. Warping may be used for correcting image distortion as well as for creative purposes...
techniques developed by Tom Brigham and Doug Smythe (AMPAS).
This technique appeared notably in 1991 in the
Michael JacksonMichael Joseph Jackson , known as the "King of Pop", was an American musician and one of the most commercially successful and influential entertainers of all time...
music video
Black Or White and in the movies
Terminator 2: Judgment DayTerminator 2: Judgment Day, commonly abbreviated as T2, is a 1991 science fiction action film directed, co-written and co-produced by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, and Robert Patrick...
,
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered CountryStar Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the sixth feature film in the Star Trek science fiction franchise. It was released in 1991 by Paramount Pictures, and is the last of the Star Trek films to include the entire core cast of the 1960s Star Trek television series. It was directed by Nicholas...
. And also with Queen's Album
The Miracle with the four band members' faces. The first application for personal computers to offer morphing was
Gryphon Software MorphMorph is one of the first commercially available morphing software programs available. Produced by Gryphon Software, it is available for Windows and Macintosh platforms.The original price was approximately US $92...
on the Apple Macintosh. Other early morphing systems included ImageMaster, MorphPlus and CineMorph, all of which premiered for the Commodore Amiga in 1992. Other programs became widely available within a year, and for a time the effect became common to the point of
clichéA cliché , is a saying, expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, rendering it a stereotype, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel...
. For high-end use, Elastic Reality (based on MorphPlus) saw its first feature film use in
In The Line of Fire (1993) and was used frequently as a plot device in Quantum Leap (work performed by the Post Group). At
VisionArt"'VisionArt Design & Animation'" was a motion picture and television visual effects company, founded in the 1980s by David Rose and Todd Hess. Though originally a small Orange County company working primarily on cable TV ads and flying logos, VisionArt moved to Santa Monica in 1992, winning its...
Ted Fay used Elastic Reality to morph Odo for
Star Trek: Deep Space NineStar Trek: Deep Space Nine is a science fiction television program that premiered in 1993 and ran for seven seasons, ending in 1999. Rooted in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe, it was created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, at the request of Brandon Tartikoff, and produced by Paramount...
. Elastic Reality was later purchased by
AvidAVID is a college-readiness system designed to increase the number of students who enroll in four-year colleges. Although AVID serves all students, it focuses on the least served students in the academic middle. The formula is simple - raise expectations of students and, with the AVID support...
, having already become the de facto system of choice, used in many hundreds of films. The technology behind Elastic Reality earned two Academy Awards in 1996 for Scientific and Technical Achievement going to Garth Dickie and Perry Kivolowitz. The effect is technically called a "spatially-warped cross-dissolve". The first social network designed for user-generated morph examples to be posted online was Galleries by
Morpheus (morphing software)Morpheus is a computer software for Windows and Mac users which is used to generate morphs between two pictures.
The latest version is 3.10, and there are various editions of this version, which can be compared . The new version is integrated with YouTube, PhotoBucket, and Morpheus Galleries...
.
In Taiwan, Aderans, a hair loss solutions provider, did a TV commercial featuring a morphing sequence in which people with lush, thick hair morph into one another, reminiscent of the end sequence of the Black or White video.
Morphing in the future
Morphing softwares continue to advance today and many programs can automatically morph images that correspond closely enough with relatively little instruction from the user. This has led to the use of morphing techniques to create convincing slow-motion effects where none existed in the original film or video footage by morphing between each individual frame using
optical flowOptical flow or optic flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by the relative motion between an observer and the scene...
technology. Morphing has also appeared as a transition technique between one scene and another in television shows, even if the contents of the two images are entirely unrelated. The software in this case attempts to find corresponding points between the images and distort one into the other as they crossfade. In effect morphing has replaced the use of crossfading as a transition in some television shows, though crossfading was originally used to produce morphing effects.
Morphing is used far more heavily today than ever before. In years past, effects were obvious, which led to their overuse. Now, morphing effects are most often designed to be invisible.
External links
Websites That Provide a Morphing Feature