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TASK 4.4:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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TASK:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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TASK: Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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Consider the difference between analogue and digital examples of morphing.

Do you agree with Klein and Sobchak’s view? Can you find examples of animations to substantiate your view?

What, if any, are the differences between an analogue approach to morphing and a digital approach?

Document your research and reflections on analogue and digital morphing with images and clips to illustrate your point and upload this to your learning log.

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TASK:
Academics, like Norman M Klein and Vivian Sobchack argue that there is an important difference between analogue morphing and digital morphing. They suggest that digital morphing programmes tend to smooth out glitches and hesitations more than analogue morphing.
Klein argues that the effects of seamless computer morphing; "displays less of the mercurial, the lighting hand and traced memories."
Klein and Sobchack also argue that analogue morphing can be used to express a 'poetics of loss' and anxiety about the organic disappearing into the industrial. An audience of analogue morphing is asked to think in terms of allegories of entropy and ruin, whereas digital morphing turns this sense of decay into a sense of fantasy.
● Consider the difference between analogue and digital examples of morphing.
● Do you agree with Klein and Sobchak's view? Can you find examples of animations to substantiate your view?
● What, if any, are the differences between an analogue approach to morphing and a digital approach?
Document your research and reflections on analogue and digital morphing with images and clips to illustrate your point and upload this to your learning log.
Analogue stop motion svankmeier dialogue

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Research 4.3: Morphing: analogue and digital

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TASK:Academics, like Norman M Klein and Vivian Sobchack argue that there is an important difference between analogue morphing and digital morphing. They suggest that digital morphing programmes tend to smooth out glitches and hesitations more than analogue morphing.

# data[].attributes.body
TASK:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
TASK:
Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.
Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
TASK: Find three examples on the internet of morphing forms that include one example of each: analogue morphing, computer graphic (1990s) and digital (contemporary). Take a screenshot of the midpoint of each transformation to try and capture the point of transition.Ian Ferguson, Bush Arnie Morph (2006) Image via Wikimedia commons

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Critiques of morphing in early animation

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Critiques of morphing in early animation

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Philosophers on morphing and the plasticity of early animation Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued the shape shifting of cartoon animation, along with slapstick comedy films, had once offered genuine resistance against rationalism and systems of control but these had been turned into ‘ideological instruments of mass deception’. Mickey Mouse , Donald Duck and Betty Boop represented, in their view, the:

“dystopian habituation of the masses to their oppression.”
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Walter Benjamin and Film-maker Sergei Eisenstein saw the popular animation industry as less of a ‘mass deception’ and more of a ‘sticking plaster’. Benjamin wrote that he saw a ‘utopian potential’ in Mickey Mouse’s global appeal and
reach. In a draft of his famous 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Mickey Mouse appeared as a figure of ‘the collective dream’ that navigated the audience to a shared ‘dream world’, in which they engaged in the therapeutic act of ‘collective laughter’. This collective laughter provided by the mass cultural product of Disney animation prompted ‘a therapeutic release of
unconscious energies’ and in so doing prevented the future ‘outbreak of mass psychosis’.

Also, in his 1933 essay, Experience and Poverty , Benjamin argued that Disney’s animation films offer a compensatory dream to those who were exhausted by the new barbarism of modern industrial life. Mickey Mouse was an embodiment
of this compensatory dream to…

“…people who have grown weary of the endless complications of everyday living,”

as well as the technologically generated experience of shock. With its technologically enhanced optical effects cinema was particularly suited to translate…

“…the individual perceptions of the psychotic or the dreamer’ into the ‘collective perception…’”
…that the audience shared through their collective viewing of films at the theatre.

Film-maker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein agreed with Benjamin. He argued that Disney’s films were a revolt against:

“partitioning and legislating, against spiritual stagnation and greyness.”

But, like Benjamin, he saw this revolt to be:

“lyrical, a daydream. Fruitless and lacking consequences.”

For Eisenstein, Disney animation offered:

“an alternative world in which the social system of rigidity is fiercely contested and temporarily suspended.”

He wrote that those who suffer under the Capitalist system of regimentation will desire ‘ plasmaticness ’ – a desire that is actualized by the malleable and protean quality of animated images on screen: animated figures that stretch, squash, and metamorphose:

“Fish and birds have the stretch and shrink, mocking at their own form.”

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The ability to visually ‘morph’ from one shape to another is unique to animation (metamorphosis and plasticity being animation’s key strengths as a medium).

Analogue morphing

Analogue animators have explored the use of sand, clay and other physical media to twist, transform and explore the abilities of animated metamorphosis.

1908 Emil Cohl’s Fantasmagoire hand-drawn animation explored fluid changes and elastic transformations of shape and form.

Early cinema and live action film made use of make-up effects, cross dissolving and cutting (a technique borrowed from replacement animation) in order to trick audiences
into believing that one thing was changing into another.

Digital morphing

In the 90’s, computer graphic morphing was developed by animation artist Peter Foldes as a definitive graphic effect that came to define the 90’s visual style. Objects and subjects were transformed into each other through fluid, surreal combinations cross-dissolved, warped images.

Peter Foldes used computer imaging to transform line drawings into other line drawings. He was the first to use
computer interpolation to transform images to shift, grow, or shrink as one image became the next.

Morphing was used in television commercials and films

such as Star Trek , Terminator 2 and Michael Jackson’s music video Black or White .

Morphing worked by finding the mid-way point between two shapes, for example, a bird and gorilla. These distorted shapes (mid-way points) would then be cross-dissolved. Cross dissolving involves the shifting of pixel colors of one
image to the corresponding pixels of the second image. In order for the morph to be convincing, however, animators needed to make alterations to this dissolve so that it took place between internal features of each creature or thing (an eye morphing into the corresponding eye, for example, rather than merely into its corresponding pixel on the plane).

Computer generated imagery (CGI) has further developed into seamless distortion and metamorphosis of forms using
much more highly developed computer processes. Now ubiquitous, this seemingly effortless shape-shifting between animate and inanimate happens all around us:

“…gravity disappears and laws of nature collapse, flesh and metal flow like water.”
Norman Klein, ‘Animation & Animorphs ’ (2000)

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Academics, like Norman M Klein and Vivian Sobchack argue that there is an important difference between analogue morphing and digital morphing. They suggest that digital morphing programmes tend to smooth out glitches and hesitations more than analogue morphing.
Klein argues that the effects of seamless computer morphing; “displays less of the mercurial, the lighting hand and traced memories.”
Klein and Sobchack also argue that analogue morphing can be used to express a ‘poetics of loss’ and anxiety about the organic disappearing into the industrial. An audience of analogue morphing is asked to think in terms of allegories of entropy and ruin, whereas digital morphing turns this sense of decay into a sense of fantasy.

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analogue morphing
computer graphic (1990s)
digital (contemporary)