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32-406: The workflow of the application is based around drawing source and destination curves or shapes onto an image using bézier curve tools. The software then automatically generates an animated distortion of the image, commonly called a warp. If the warp is used to blend two images together, the effect is called morphing . Elastic Reality made its name with the ease of use of its tool, and the quality of

64-451: A dissolve transformation of the clothing of a female character. Maurice Tourneur 's 1915 film Alias Jimmy Valentine featured a subtle dissolve transformation of the main character from respected citizen Lee Randall into his criminal alter ego Jimmy Valentine. The Peter Tchaikovsky Story in a 1959 TV-series episode of Disneyland features a swan automaton transforming into a real ballet dancer. In 1985, Godley & Creme created

96-484: A "morph" effect using analogue cross-fades on parts of different faces in the video for " Cry ". In animation, the morphing effect was created long before the introduction of cinema. A phenakistiscope designed by its inventor Joseph Plateau was printed around 1835 and shows the head of a woman changing into a witch and then into a monster. Émile Cohl 's 1908 animated film Fantasmagorie featured much morphing of characters and objects drawn in simple outlines. In

128-454: A designer can create an intermediate between two styles, for example generating a semibold font by compromising between a bold and regular style, or extend a trend to create an ultra-light or ultra-bold. The technique is commonly used by font design studios. Perry Kivolowitz Perry Kivolowitz (born 1961) is an American computer scientist and business person. In 1985, he co-founded Advanced Systems Design Group which built hardware for

160-400: A matched dissolve - a gradual change between two pictures without warping the shapes in the images - while others did change the shapes in between the start and end phases of the transformation. Known since at least the end of the 16th century, Tabula scalata is a type of painting with two images divided over a corrugated surface. Each image is only correctly visible from a certain angle. If

192-634: A more detailed digital morphing sequence with a person changing into different animals. 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 & Magic , using software developed by Tom Brigham and Doug Smythe ( AMPAS ). In 1991, morphing appeared notably in the Michael Jackson music video " Black or White " and in

224-510: A nose could grow to enormous size, simply by slowly sliding away a piece of glass with black paint that masked part of another glass plate with the picture. In the first half of the 19th century " dissolving views " were a popular type of magic lantern show, mostly showing landscapes gradually dissolving from a day to night version or from summer to winter. Other uses are known, for instance Henry Langdon Childe showed groves transforming into cathedrals. The 1910 short film Narren-grappen shows

256-428: A precursor to Elastic Reality called MorphPlus. Other software products included Image Independence (graphic file conversion and scaling), ASDG Abekas driver, Lightning F/X (for lightning effects (Later called Avid LFX)) and NSA (No Strings Attached) for removing wires from live action effects. As early as 1994, Elastic Reality for SGI, (written by Paul Miller at ASDG in collaboration with Ted Fay at VisionArt ) became

288-572: A separate application which makes it easier to use in conjunction with other tools. On the other hand, the classic Elastic Reality application featured items like shape grouping which could be used for matting or complex intersection groups, a path tracing tool, and more seldom used motion graphics tools to constrain and animate shapes on a path and edit keyframes. Avid DS features equivalent animation tools in its "Graphics" module, and standard tools in these host applications can be used to mask and combine image warping effects, often in ways more powerful than

320-578: Is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes (or morphs) one image or shape into another through a seamless transition. Traditionally such a depiction would be achieved through dissolving techniques on film. Since the early 1990s, this has been replaced by computer software to create more realistic transitions. A similar method is applied to audio recordings, for example, by changing voices or vocal lines. Long before digital morphing, several techniques were used for similar image transformations. Some of those techniques are closer to

352-517: Is derived from Avid Media Illusion 6.0. Compared to the classic Elastic Reality application, these effects use the 2D shape, user interface and other features native to these products, and the interaction is different, although the results can be the same. For example, in Avid Media Illusion and XSI 6.0, morphs can be performed with B-spline curves and polygonal lines, can process 16-bit images, and offer an interactive OpenGL preview of

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384-630: The Avid Elastic Reality package once in widespread use. Dr. Garth Dickie was a co-recipient of this award. Kivolowitz is a principal in SilhouetteFX LLC. In December 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences granted an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement to Silhouette. He co-founded Profound Effects, Inc. (2001–2008), Hypercosm Inc. (1999–2001) and KSK Electrics, LLC (2013–2015). Kivolowitz

416-470: The Commodore Amiga . This company was renamed Elastic Reality, Inc. and became well known as a digital imaging software provider. In 1987, Kivolowitz invented the recoverable ram drive In 1995 this company sold to Avid Technology , Inc. In 1996 he received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for the invention of shape-driven warping and morphing as exemplified in

448-666: The 150 Ways the University of Wisconsin has Touched the World. In January 2018, Kivolowitz was made Chair of the Computer Science Department at Carthage College . Kivolowitz lectured for AT&T and Bell Labs in the early 1980s on Unix Internals and debugging primarily at an AT&T facility in Piscataway New Jersey but also across the country. In April 2012, Kivolowitz resumed lecturing on

480-478: The classic Elastic Reality application offered. Perry Kivolowitz and Garth Dickie received a 1996 Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the invention of shape-based warping and morphing embodied in Elastic Reality. This award recognizes that all shape-based warping and morphing systems descend from this innovation. operations. Morphing Morphing

512-526: The de facto morphing system in the film and broadcast industry, and contributed to hundreds of feature films and television effects, including The Iron Giant , Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , Independence Day , The Mask , and Batman Forever . In literature, Elastic Reality was notably used by illustrator David B. Mattingly to create the covers for the Animorphs series. Along with Gryphon Software Morph , Elastic Reality continues to be used in

544-465: The early 1990s, computer techniques capable of more convincing results saw increasing use. 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

576-419: The images and distort one into the other as they crossfade. While perhaps less obvious than in the past, morphing is used heavily today. Whereas the effect was initially a novelty, today, morphing effects are most often designed to be seamless and invisible to the eye. A particular use for morphing effects is modern digital font design. Using morphing technology, called interpolation or multiple master tech,

608-529: 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 Morph on the Macintosh . Other early morphing systems included ImageMaster, MorphPlus and CineMorph, all of which premiered for the Amiga in 1992. Other programs became widely available within a year, and for a time the effect became common to

640-427: The pictures are matched properly, a primitive type of morphing effect occurs when changing from one viewing angle to the other. Around 1790 French shadow play showman François Dominique Séraphin used a metal shadow figure with jointed parts to have the face of a young woman changing into that of a witch. Some 19th century mechanical magic lantern slides produced changes to the appearance of figures. For instance

672-613: The point of cliché . 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 in Quantum Leap (work performed by the Post Group). At VisionArt Ted Fay used Elastic Reality to morph Odo for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . The Snoop Dogg music video " Who Am I? (What's My Name?) ", where Snoop Dogg and the others morph into dogs. Elastic Reality

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704-662: The present day on old computers maintained for the purpose of running Elastic Reality. In 1997, Avid made the core image warping engine available in the form of one morphing and one image warping effect in Avid Media Illusion 5.0. These effects were integrated one year later in Avid|DS's image compositing module. The newest product to make these available is Softimage|XSI v6.0 , released in December 2006, which features an integrated 2D image compositing module that

736-652: The process of debugging As a graduate student Kivolowitz authored one of the earliest key logger programs, the source code of which was posted to Usenet in November 1983. Kivolowitz authored an early paper on file systems for write-once media presented at the 1984 USENIX conference in Salt Lake City. Since 2004 Kivolowitz has been an invited speaker and provides expert testimony on the subject of detecting tampered digital images (both still images and video). In 2006, Kivolowitz wed Sara Krueger Kivolowitz. He

768-602: The resulting warps. Other warping tools have typically offered a simpler warping and morphing based on animating points on a grid, which can require significantly more work from the artist to animate distortion of organic shapes such as human faces. The application also featured basic color correction and image compositing tools, as well as the ability to keyframe the motion of bézier shapes in groups and onto motion paths, and could be used for motion graphics effects not typically associated with morphing. The application supported 8-bit and 16-bit images, and image sequences. The product

800-433: 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. To compute the transformation of image coordinates required for the distortion, the algorithm of Beier and Neely can be used. In or before 1986, computer graphics company Omnibus created a digital animation for a Tide commercial with a Tide detergent bottle smoothly morphing into

832-694: The shape of the United States. The effect was programmed by Bob Hoffman. Omnibus re-used the technique in the movie Flight of the Navigator (1986). It featured scenes with a computer generated spaceship that appeared to change shape. The plaster cast of a model of the spaceship was scanned and digitally modified with techniques that included a reflection mapping technique that was also developed by programmer Bob Hoffman. The 1986 movie The Golden Child implemented early digital morphing effects from animal to human and back. Willow (1988) featured

864-470: 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 flow 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 algorithm in this case attempts to find corresponding points between

896-403: The warp. The classic Elastic Reality application offered only Bezier curve , 8-bit image processing, and a wireframe preview which required a rendering step for accurate preview. In Avid DS, the built-in 2D tracker can be used to procedurally animate the shapes. In all three host applications, the effects are offered as image operators inside an image compositing tree, and do not require launching

928-416: Was Galleries by Morpheus . 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 algorithms continue to advance and programs can automatically morph images that correspond closely enough with relatively little instruction from

960-633: Was accepted into the Visual Effects Society in 2012. From 1997 to 1999 and from 2006 to 2015, Kivolowitz was a member of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison , first as an adjunct faculty member and then as a Faculty Associate and Instructional Program Director. During the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Sesquicentennial Celebration, Kivolowitz was honored as being one of

992-433: Was later purchased by Avid , 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

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1024-558: Was originally created by ASDG of Madison, Wisconsin, which renamed itself Elastic Reality Inc, in 1994, following the success of its product. The company was acquired by Avid Technology in March 1995. The product was rebranded Softimage Elastic Reality after Avid separately acquired Softimage in 1998. Before 1994, ASDG had started on the Amiga, and produced an image processing application called Art Department Professional (ADPro), and in 1992

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