Hypercompendia

Just got myself a few new “toys” – that means software that’s fun to play with despite its nature of productivity. What I got was Smith Micro’s Poser 7, Anime Studio Pro 6, and their Morpheus Animation Suite. (Links are to the latest versions.) Obviously, these aren’t the latest version of each, but at a total cost of $60, it was better for me to feel I could afford these on a whim rather than either wait until I could afford to get them at full cost or feel pressured.

The easiest one to learn was the first one I’m trying and that’s Morpheus. There is a limit to exactly what you can do, but I must say that already I can see where I could have used this to make my life much easier in the 2008 production of Recycling, a poem I made into a movie with images I worked over in Photoshop and then dropped into Windows Movie Maker.

The sequence in particular that I’m working with is the transition of a photograph of a face (mine) into a fetus. Here are the images I’d used in the final piece:

Now there were several images in between these as steps in the process, but these were the finals I used. There were transition effects between them, available in the Movie Maker program.

But Morpheus, while still requiring much of the work to be done in Photoshop (though I haven’t learned the Warp feature to see how much it can do) I think that the transition between the shots in the sequence could be much more vibrant, more physical, in the Morpheus platform.

I intend to play with these to see what possible effects can be achieved, for example, I am not sure if it’s possible to do a continuous strip from a series of images such as the above eight. The program has a setup of making A into B, but there is also a movie strip with frames so that may be the way to work it–though between the pairs, I’m not sure what happens.

At any rate, I’ll be back with the details as I work.