Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
Anyone remember Animorphs?
I’d imagine most people do to some degree, seeing as over 35 million copies of the books
by K.A. Applegate have been printed since 1996.
And even if you’ve never read them, chances are you’ve seen at least one of the iconic
Animorphs covers, especially if you grew up in the 90s.
Each of the 54 books in the original print run of Animorphs features a depiction of a
kid transforming into something, usually an animal or a fictional creature.
And I dunno about you, but I’ve always been captivated by this kinda surreal imagery,
so Animorphs covers have stuck in my brain ever since.
Now, thanks to the magic of ill-advised purchases after a couple drinks, I now have the hardware
and the software to make my own morphs!
[laughs] Oh this is awesome.
Introducing Elastic Reality, a program that sold for $995 when it first launched for the
Apple Macintosh in 1994.
This so-called “Macintosh Special Effects System” was created by ASDG Incorporated,
expanding on their prior program from 1992 called Morph Plus for the Commodore Amiga.
But yeah, it was Elastic Reality in particular that was used in the creation of the classic
Animorphs covers and I am absolutely psyched to show you how it works!
Before we do that though, I gotta mention David B. Mattingly, the artist responsible
for the majority of Animorphs illustrations.
His career began in the late ‘70s at Walt Disney Studios, working as a matte painter
for movies like The Black Hole, Tron, and Dick Tracy.
By 1996 though, Mattingly was taking illustration gigs
for everything from commercials to magazines and books.
That’s where publisher Scholastic comes in.
They’d already published the first Animorphs books that summer
but weren’t 100% pleased with the covers.
According to Mr. Mattingly, The first three Animorphs books were done by another artist,
but Scholastic wasn't happy with that artwork.
They knew that they wanted someone to do morphing, so Scholastic art director Dave Tomasino
called me up and he said, "We heard that you knew how to do morphing.”
I just had bought a copy of this very primitive morphing program, the only one available at
the time called Elastic Reality.
After getting the spec on the Animorphs books, I went home... and came in with some samples.
I said, "How about this?" and they were like, "Yeah, that's it!"
Right, so, let’s get Elastic Reality unboxed and see if we can accomplish anything even
close to Mr. Mattingly’s work.
Removing the outer sleeve reveals a beefy cardboard box
which itself holds a pile of beefy contents.
First up is a 27-minute VHS tape covering the software, definitely have to check that out in a bit.
Then we’ve got the program on two 3.5” diskettes
with GS-89-120 written on each of the labels.
Hehe, so yeah my copy of Elastic Reality was actually
property of the US federal government at one point.
I grabbed it along with some other productivity software in a surplus auction, so if you see
any government labels that’s why.
I didn’t break into the Pentagon or whatever.
Anyway, it also comes with a quick reference card outlining the most notable menus, commands,
and other such info referenced quickly on a card.
And there are two substantial tomes of spiral-bound documentation: a getting started guide and
a full-length manual.
Each of which pertain to the Macintosh version only, even if the basic setup, creation process
of morphs, and overall workflow also apply to the later versions
for Windows PCs and SGI workstations.
Finally, without further ado, “IT’S MORPHIN’ TIME!”
Starting up Elastic Reality doesn’t look like much, with only a blank timeline and
a bunch of dropdown menus that can’t be utilized yet.
There are a handful of demonstration morphs to check out, pretty handy when referencing
how to pull off certain effects, but this only does so much in regards to teaching you
how to make your own.
The manual provides several tutorials in text form, but screw that, let’s take a quick
peek at that VHS tape it came with and bask in that beautiful mid-90s production value.
[VHS tape insertion sounds]
[VCR begins playing tape]
[ASDG logo whooshes in, ‘90s stock music plays]
It begins with a lengthy sizzle reel showing off what the software can do
morphing cars and faces and objects and all sorts of neat stuff.
Then we’re greeted by a man with a Macintosh who simply cannot contain his excitement!
-The objective of this tutorial is to demonstrate some of the basics of Elastic Reality.
-In it, we’ll perform some warps on a human face using only two squares.
-You’ll be astonished at the variety of effects that can be created with just
-two shapes and a little imagination. Please follow along step by step.
[gloriously ‘90s jingle plays]
Yeah all right so I’m not gonna play the whole 27 minute
tape obviously, regardless of how... captivating this tutorial may be.
In fact the best part is the intro, which I can’t play because it got hit with a copyright
match on YouTube.
So if you wanna see the whole thing check the video description below for an archive
I uploaded elsewhere. Anyway, yeah!
The basic process of creating a morph involves importing two images, with the starting image
being placed into the A Roll and the final image dropping into the B Roll.
The images can be of anything you like, so long as they’re QuickDraw compatible using
something like the PICT file format.
At this point, you can double click the FX Roll to open the edit window, presenting you
with your A Roll and B Roll images.
On the left is a toolbar consisting of 10 tools, with several familiar options if you’ve
messed with vector-based image editors.
The idea here is to outline and designate parts of the image you want to morph, accomplished
by placing closed and open shapes consisting of bezier curves.
As an example, I’ll just quickly outline this photo of a Suzuki using the pen tool,
outlining the general shape of it and laying down control points.
Then moving onto the B Roll, I’m gonna do the same with a photo of my Lumix GH5, this
time using the freehand tool to outline more of its angles.
Once those are in place, you can use the reshape tool to grab, move around, and adjust the
curvature from each control point as needed.
Now when we go back to that A/B comparison, we can see the outline for each image.
All we have to do here is join them together by selecting both of them and choosing “Join”
from the Shape menu.
And that’s all you need to do to make a basic morph!
Opening the Morph menu provides options for rendering, previewing, and output, but we
can go straight into the rendering and see what happens.
By default it’ll produce a morph file that can be played back in QuickTime, with Elastic
Reality interpolating the keyframes between your two images based on the shapes you’ve
joined and a crapload of math.
And congratulations, it’s a morph! [chuckles]
Okay so it’s not quite Animorphs material,
but that’s the gist of it.
How it turns out really comes down to how much time you’re willing to invest in each
stage of the process.
Obviously, you need images that are decently-suited to morphing into each other, with things like
a solid background, clearly-defined edges,
and a plan to join specific portions of the images together.
It gets ridiculously more involved than my quick example earlier of course, with control
over individual frames, motion paths, vector correspondence points, and on and on.
You’re not limited to placing closed shapes either, which is useful for ensuring specific
shapes morph into one another in the final render.
Like here I made my own face warp into the IBM PC from the LGR logo, with my glasses
morphing into the monitor, my nose warping into the top of the case, and my mouth turning
into the floppy drives.
Hehe, the final result is a bit pointier than it could be, but with enough time it’s quite
possible to come up with something better.
However, you’ll never get results as well-defined as David Mattingly’s Animorphs covers, at
least not using this software alone.
And that’s because he didn’t rely exclusively on Elastic Reality.
Recalling his experiences with the software, Mattingly said, It could produce problems
with the image.
So about 50 percent of my images were painted so I could make up for all the shortcomings
of the program. And that makes sense.
Even when you nail the shapes and keyframes and render morph stages as high quality as
possible, you still don’t get results worthy of an Animorphs book.
Instead, Elastic Reality was a valuable step in the overall creative process, performing
a lot of the grunt work by figuring out how to morph two distinct shapes and generating
images to use as a basis for the final illustrations.
And the uses for Elastic Reality didn’t stop with Animorphs either!
Throughout the ‘90s it was the de facto standard in image and video morphing, being
utilized in hundreds of TV shows and movies from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, to The Mask,
to Batman Forever.
Two of the engineers behind Elastic Reality even won an Oscar at the 69th Academy Awards
for their contributions to its development, with credit going to Avid Technology who bought
out Elastic Reality in 1995.
Oddly enough though, the program was discontinued as a standalone product in 1997, despite the
Oscars and widespread usage in Hollywood.
The tech remained in use regardless, being rolled into products from Avid and Softimage,
and legacy hardware sometimes being kept around just to run Elastic Reality.
So yeah, I’m super impressed by Elastic Reality’s capabilities and how easy it is
to use, even in its earliest iterations.
It takes very little time to produce half-decent results using two unrelated images, and I’m
positive that morphs more suited to an Animorphs cover are attainable with enough time and skill.
Neither of which I possess at the moment, but whatever man, my morphs are still better
looking than the new reprint covers, you seen that crap?
The heck kinda slapdash Photoshop job is that?
I say bring back Elastic Reality for Animorphs cover creation, cuz even if the resulting
morphs need a talented illustrator finish the job, it’d still be an improvement on
those new covers.
Yeesh.
Oh hi you’re still here, awesome!
I’ve got new videos on all kinds of tech topics each week here on LGR, so stick around
and watch more if you’d like to stick around and watch more.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!