Morphing

About

Morphing is an animation effect that transforms one image into another through a seamless transition. The effect is typically produced with image morphing software programs.

Origin

One of the earliest known morphing effects was used in the 1985 music video for the song “Cry” by the English rock duo Godley & Creme. The video used an analogue cross-fade technique to produce the effect since morphing computer software was not yet available. The first film to use digital morphing was the 1988 fantasy Willow. In 1991, the film Terminator 2: Judgement Day used morphing for the shapeshifting T-1000 villan, and the music video for Michael Jackson’s single “Black or White” showed a series of people morphing into one another at the end of the song (5:27 in the video below):

Morphing computer software became available in the early 1990s with programs like FotoMorph^[3], FantaMorph^[2], and Gryphon Software Morph.^[4]

Spread

The domain for the website Morph Thing^[1], which allows users to make custom morphed images, was registered on March 17th, 2007. On June 9th, 2012, a Morph Thing pictures thread appeared on 4chan’s /b/^[12] (random) board. On October 24th, 2008, Funny or Die published a video titled “Morphing McCain: Two of a Kind” with photos of then United States Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin morphing into former President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

On September 7th, 2011, Justin Ribeiro of Stickman Ventures^[10] unveiled a WebGL demo for Ginger^[11], an interactive facial rig that uses morphing technology to change facial expressions in real time. Morphing animated GIFs are sometimes featured on animated image blog Senor GIF under the “mindwarp” tag.^[7] Morphing videos can be found on YouTube^[6] and on Vimeo under the tag “morphing.”^[5] The Facebook^[9] interest page for “Morphing” has received 415 likes as of February 6th, 2012.

Micaël Reynaud

Animated GIF artist Micaël Reynaud^[16] of Montpellier, France often uses morphing techniques in his animations. On September 28th, the art blog Visual News^[14] published an article about morphing animated GIFs produced by Reynaud and linked to his Google+ ^[15] page showcasing some of his work, including Amalgation.

Notable Images

Click for animated versions:

Notable Videos

Search Interest

Search query volume for “morphing” has been in steady decline since 2006.

External References