Visual effects 101 – Morphing

While you are reading this, I am enjoying a break on a sunny beach, far away from any electronics (except maybe my DS). To give you a little taste, I’ve taken a few random shots of Flickr and morphed them together with one of Deadmau5′ early tracks.

Morphing is a visual effect to transition between 2 images, the initial goal of the effect was to make the transition seamless but the principals can be used to create interesting distorted visuals. As always, Wikipedia had much more detail on this. It’s an effect that is used more then you’d think, I even suspect these guys of using it instead of their “3D face animation”. But it’s also an effect that never really grabs attention. There were a few video clips using it, many years ago. So long ago, in fact, I can’t remember the artist.

I used WinMorph and it’s video editing brother, Wax for this video. Make sure to not use the version 1.0 of Wax that is bundled with WinMorph, it is pretty buggy and not compatible with the most recent, much improved, 2.0e version. However, if you don’t like it, there are many more applications out there, just pick your favorite.

Here’s another nice morph video.