Hi everyone, I would like to share my last project and tell a little bit about it. As I mentioned before on my introduction, I used to create morphs of my sons and used them on the farewell party when they went on a mission of the Church. This one is my 4h. The first one had the whole picture background present and only the face morph from one photo to the next. That was almost 5 years ago...
Here is how it looked like:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rklw9RB0FWY[/youtube]
Then when my other son went on a mission (this one that got married last week) I decided to do something better. So I would like to have only the face morphing with no distracting background. That was a very time consuming task, since I didn't know the wonders of automatic image extractor of PSE7. At that time I had to manually edit all the photos in MS Paint (that's right, Paint!) and remove all the unwanted pixels. I painted the background with green so latter I would be able to remove the green in Power Director with the chroma-key effect.
Of course thare were some green left over in the final video, but at least I had the clouds moving behind the morph. That was my second generation of morph. The video used a music from Celine Dion (if I could) and was blocked in Germany. Other countries should be able to watch and hear the music.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1cT7spsTxU[/youtube]
Then my 3rd son went on his mission (a month ago) and this time I had Photoshop Elements to automagically remove the background and saved every image in .png keeping the transparency of the removed background. Then later in Fantmorph I created the morph itself and was able to generated a 32bits AVI that keeps the transparent background. So latter I used the 32 bit AVI morph on Video Track 2 with the moving clouds on Video Track 1 and got the effect below. No more green stuff left behind.... The idea of the opening was taken from the David Bowie Changes Album cover.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6CYBpcW65w[/youtube]
Then it came the time to do a diffent project, a wedding one. The one in the video at the begining of this post. To set the requirements and chalenges, the bride and groom asked me to keep it short. Around 5 minutes. The whole video that would contain more then just the morph. This time I would show both growing at the same time. Since I am an amateur photographer I had tons of photos of my son, but she had just the regular amount of photo regular people takes during the childhood of their sons, especially in pre-digital ages... So I didn't have the exact same age of both to play with, I had to use what I've got.
So my idea was to start with the morph where they grow from babies to grownups (up to date), but then I will have to start showing some photos on a more traditional Pre Wedding "Slide Show". But the last showed picture was a recent one... So I came up with the idea of what I've called the "reverse block" which fullfill two purposes: 1 make them babies again, 2 show the whole picture from where I've extracted their faces for the morph. So I 've made this part as quick as possible, the idea was just present the photos enough to be able to be recognized, not to be "carefully watched and remembered when it was taken and how wonderful they looked ...
Then I break their life in 4 parts : Before they begin dating, dating, the mission of my son, and the reunion after he've returned. All of this in less then 5 minutes....
So I came up with the idea that since, he was on the right of the screen on the morph, and she on left (of course), then I would make his photos come from the right and her's from the left. I decided that, even though I would like to use as many photos as I could (in my first selection I came up with more then 300 photos of him...
way over what I could accomodate. That was one of the more difficult part, to select the ones that would made the final cut. So after, some test, we decided that 2 seconds still on the screen would be enough for people to look at them and enjoy the photo. But I need 1 second to put the photo on the screen and another 1 second to take it out of the screen. Fortunately I discover the "presets" functions of PSE7, that saved me a lot of time. I had one preset for him, and another one for her. I made it so that when ond photo was leaving the screen, at the same time the other photo was entering... this way I save some precious seconds. On the parts where they were together (dating and reunion) there was no his or her side, so the photos comes from the center and just move around the screen making room for more photos to come. At this point I've used the "Snapshot Effects" tutorial from muvipix.com Unfortunately the sound of the camera shutter with the original song they've choosen was replaced by the Audio swap from Youtube. The background video (the rotating rings) also came from muvipix.com. I have to play a lot with the keyframes to move, rotate and place the photos where I want, and where I could still see them on the photos below, where possible. This part the presets helped, but a manual intervention was needed to place the photos exacly where I wanted them.
This part of the photos moving around took me 9 video tracks alltogether with the background video, otherwise I would have to work a lot on still images that would contain the photos already shown, if I went that route, including another photo or changin the order of them (which did happened) would be way worst then it was.
I've thought of animating the photos in the part where we have his photos coming from one side and hers from the other. I even tested this option, but I thought that it was too much.... Then I decided to just let the photos to display for 2 seconds without any animation.
There are some text in portuguese, and if the pictures didn't speak for themselves, let me know and I can add a glossary in here, so everyone understands what was going on...
I hope you guys enjoy it and any suggestion woudl be certainly welcome. I still have some other sons to marry....
