Morphing

File:Bush-Arnie-morph.jpg

3 Frames from a morph from George W. Bush to Arnold Schwarzenegger showing the mid-point between the two extremes

Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes (or morphs) one image into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through some magical or 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 Since the early 1990s, this has been replaced by computer software to create more realistic transitions.

In early feature films a morph would be achieved by cross-fading from the motion picture of one actor or object to another. Because of the limitations of this technique the actors or objects would have to stay virtually motionless in front of a background that did not change or move in the frame between the before and after shots.

Later more sophisticated cross-fading techniques were employed that faded different parts of one image to the other gradually instead of fading the entire image at once. This style of morphing was perhaps most famously employed in the video former 10cc members Kevin Godley and Lol Creme (performing as Godley & Creme) produced in 1985 for their song Cry. It consisted of 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, however, this had little to do with modern-day computer generated morphing effects, since it was merely a "fade-over" using fully analogue equipment.

Though The Golden Child implemented very crude morphing effects from animal to human and back, the first movie to employ detailed morphing was Willow, in 1988. A similar process was used a year later in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to create Walter Donovan's gruesome demise. Both effects were created by Industrial Light and Magic using grid warping techniques developed by Doug Smythe.

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 countour 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.

This technique appeared notably in 1991 in the Michael Jackson music video Black Or White and in the movies Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The first application for personal computers to offer morphing was Gryphon Software's Morph on the Apple Macintosh. Other early morphing systems included ImageMaster, Morph Plus 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 cliché. For high-end use, Avid Elastic Reality (based on Morph Plus) became 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".

Morphing software continues 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 (see optical flow). 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.

See also

• Morph target animation
• Avid Elastic Reality
• Escafil device

External links

• Morphing, a qualitative Description with Illustrations (Gernot Hoffman) (pdf)
• Scientific And Technical Academy Awards Database
• Tutorial on morphing using Adobe After Effects
• xmorph, a free program to morph images
• WinMorph, a free program to morph images on windows