Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/309120
47 MAY-JUN 14 / CINEMONTAGE 47 MAY-JUN 14 / CINEMONTAGE TECH TIPS know what morphing is, it's the effect of making one person (or creature, animal or object, for that matter) turn into someone (or something) else. One of the most visible and effective uses of morphing back then was in the 1991 music video for Michael Jackson's song Black or White, which ended with an impressive sequence of people of different genders and races morphing into one another. Many of us who worked in visual effects were impressed by that seminal video sequence. Check it out on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2AitTPI5U0 (see Figure 3). In the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99), the morphing effect was used as a central storytelling device through the character Odo, who could change or transmogrify into something else depending on the circumstance (see Figure 4). In those days, I couldn't count all the times I would hear the question "Why don't we just morph it?" in the company where I worked. The morphs for Odo were created in Elastic Reality, a popular morphing application at that time. Gryphon Morph was another popular program for morphing. I thought it was curious when those two morphing programs somehow evaporated from the market. Avid bought Elastic Reality and then, in 1999, stopped making it; Gryphon Morph simply was discontinued. Morphing, it seemed, had lost its popularity. Nevertheless, morphing remains a great effect and has its place given the time, subject and circumstance. Personally, I needed to do some morphing not too long ago but could not find any program that could accomplish it. I thought it was kind of strange that an effect that was so in demand at one time didn't seem to have any software that could handle it. Then I learned that SilhouetteFX had morphing capabilities. To my surprise and delight, not only could the program do it, but it was exceptionally good at it. Actually, this should come as no surprise. Silhouette's morphing feature was created by Perry Kivolowitz, who received a 1996 Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the co-invention of shape-based warping and morphing in Elastic Reality. That's right, Silhouette's morphing abilities were engineered by one of the inventors and pioneers behind Elastic Reality; a nice pedigree. Warping is related to morphing, but essentially different. Warping is the transformation (and animation) of pixels in a single image. With warping, you can create bulging facial features, distort images or make animals talk. Morphing, on the other hand, transforms and blends the pixels of one image into another one, often over a series of frames. Both morphing and warping require source and target splines. To control the way shapes morph into each other, you need to use the correspondence tool, otherwise the pixels can move in an unpredictable and Above, left, Figure 2: Silhouette adds inverse kinematics to rotoscoping in V5. Above, right, Figure 3: Part of the morph- ing sequence from Michael Jackson's Black or White mu- sic video. Courtesy of Sony. Silhouette is a highly effective and very well-engineered tool with an accessible user interface. CineMontage_May-Jun_14-3b.indd 47 4/16/14 2:37 PM