HIStoric
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I did search and find a post about this in one of those big "Dangerous 25" threads, but it was overlooked by the other Dangerous-related posts so I gave it it's own thread as it deserves!
Here's a great article on the morphing scene in Black or White, it features behind the scenes images and even sketches too! It is technical at times but gives you a great insight into the background and creation of one of the most iconic images from MJ's videos
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/vfx/oral-history-morphing-michael-jacksons-black-white-144015.html
---
An Oral History of Morphing in Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’
By Ian Failes | 11/14/2016 4:24 pm
Before Pacific Data Images (PDI) was bought by DreamWorks and became one of the powerhouses of CG animation with Antz and then Shrek, it was affectionately known as ‘the morphing house.’ That reputation was firmly established with the studio’s work on the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”, which celebrates its 25th anniversary today.
In interviews with several key artists involved in the famous face transitions seen in the video, Cartoon Brew revisits how PDI’s morphing tech came to be, how it was used on “Black or White”, and how it launched an era of overuse of the visual effect.
[video=youtube;pTFE8cirkdQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ[/video]
‘That was morphing’
Jamie Dixon (visual effects supervisor, PDI): We got a call from Propaganda Films and they said they were doing this Michael Jackson project directed by John Landis, and in it they were trying to show that all races are the same and that people are fundamentally the same. And they had this sequence where there were going to be a bunch of faces that are transitioning from one to the other. We’d done that work before. That was morphing.
Tim Clawson (head of production, Propaganda Films): It was the first song off the new album from Michael. He hired us to do all the music videos from that album. Actually, with Michael you could never say ‘music video,’ you had to say ‘short film.’
Jamie Dixon: One of the inspirations was a music video from the 1980s called Cry by Godley and Creme. Here they basically had a bunch of faces that changed but they did it the hard way. They got the cameras to line up and they kept the features as lined up as best as possible but they were still doing dissolves between them.
[video=youtube;KxtPRF6NG7I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxtPRF6NG7I[/video]
Tim Clawson: We talked to Lol Creme about how they did that – they had no money so they didn’t really use visual effects. He said, ‘Well, if you line up the eyes, then you know the faces will all fit on top of each other. And you just have to make some very subtle adjustments.’
From car commercials and Terminator 2 to Michael Jackson
Carl Rosendahl (founder, PDI): We had opened PDI’s L.A. office in 1990 to do feature film work, but were still primarily producing commercials and some broadcast graphics. Our goal from the mid-’80s on was to build the studio to be able to produce our own fully animated feature films. We saw morphing as a great tool to help with film and commercial effects, and had built a tool that enabled us to do it faster and better than anyone else at the time. By the time “Black or White” came along we had already done quite a few commercials with it, and we thought that the video would show it off beautifully.
Thad Beier (R&D manager, PDI): The summer before we got the work for “Black or White,” we had to do some warping for a Plymouth Voyager minivan commercial and we had to design a tool to do it. So Jamie Dixon and I were sitting around one weekend and it was like, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do.’ So we tried probably twenty different things. We were trying to transition from one car to another to show the new version of the car.
[video=youtube;0b939O7dGqQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b939O7dGqQ[/video]
Jamie Dixon: This commercial got out there and everybody loved it. It was a fresh new thing that nobody had ever seen before. So now we were on the map in terms of doing morphing, and the only other place that was doing anything with that at the time was ILM, which had done it in Willow first.
Shawn Neely (technical director, PDI): We were just ‘morphing’ still images at that point but the advancement was that one person could basically do the job that previously it would take an animator and shader and lighter, and a bunch of technical directors to work on – a whole 3D team.
Thad Beier: To do that Plymouth work we ended up drawing a line on this image and a line on that image that corresponded to the feature you wanted it to end up looking like. And we did that for a whole bunch of lines and came up with an algorithm so that we could warp one to the other to make all those lines correspond. And it worked pretty well. I couldn’t quite believe it.
Jamie Dixon: How did we come up with the name morphing? Well, somebody did an article on the car commercial and they asked, ‘What do you guys call this?’ And we came up with the word morphing at that point. ILM called their tool ‘morf’, but when the writer was asking about the car commercial article I said, ‘Well, m-o-r-p-h is how I would spell it.’
Thad Beier: On Willow they had used an algorithm that was far harder to do. Rather than just have a situation where the artist draws the things he or she wants to correspond to, they put up meshes over the whole screen, and people had to drag the meshes to correspond. That was infinitely harder and less precise. The nice thing about drawing individual lines is that you draw a few lines and you look at the morph, and you say, ‘Okay the lines don’t line up,’ so you draw a line over the eyes and then they line up, and you just keep on going and keep adding points or lines until you get everything to move the way you want.
Jamie Dixon: Before we started working on the “Black or White” video, we’d actually also bid on James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Boss Film had been approached by Jim’s company to bid on the transformations of the liquid metal character, the T-1000. And we were there doing this other project and they said, ‘Hey, do you guys know anything about this kind of thing? We thought we could try and figure out how to do that – this feature-based morphing – and the result was an almost parallel evolution with ILM in figuring out a way to do morphing. [ILM ultimately relied on a technique of model interpolation as well as more traditional morphing for the Terminator 2 T-1000 transitions].
Tackling the ‘simple’ scene
Jamie Dixon: Once we were asked to do “Black or White”, we did some face tests. I remember we took a picture of Carl Rosendahl, and he had a kid who was four or five years old and we took a picture of him too and we morphed Carl’s kid into Carl. It was kind of a revelation. You literally could see this kid growing up right in front of your eyes. It had a weirdly strong emotional effect on you when you would see that.
Read the rest of the article here! http://www.cartoonbrew.com/vfx/oral-history-morphing-michael-jacksons-black-white-144015.html
(Gotta support the website that went to the effort to interview them and publish this!)
Here's a great article on the morphing scene in Black or White, it features behind the scenes images and even sketches too! It is technical at times but gives you a great insight into the background and creation of one of the most iconic images from MJ's videos
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/vfx/oral-history-morphing-michael-jacksons-black-white-144015.html
---
An Oral History of Morphing in Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’
By Ian Failes | 11/14/2016 4:24 pm
Before Pacific Data Images (PDI) was bought by DreamWorks and became one of the powerhouses of CG animation with Antz and then Shrek, it was affectionately known as ‘the morphing house.’ That reputation was firmly established with the studio’s work on the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”, which celebrates its 25th anniversary today.
In interviews with several key artists involved in the famous face transitions seen in the video, Cartoon Brew revisits how PDI’s morphing tech came to be, how it was used on “Black or White”, and how it launched an era of overuse of the visual effect.
[video=youtube;pTFE8cirkdQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ[/video]
‘That was morphing’
Jamie Dixon (visual effects supervisor, PDI): We got a call from Propaganda Films and they said they were doing this Michael Jackson project directed by John Landis, and in it they were trying to show that all races are the same and that people are fundamentally the same. And they had this sequence where there were going to be a bunch of faces that are transitioning from one to the other. We’d done that work before. That was morphing.
Tim Clawson (head of production, Propaganda Films): It was the first song off the new album from Michael. He hired us to do all the music videos from that album. Actually, with Michael you could never say ‘music video,’ you had to say ‘short film.’
Jamie Dixon: One of the inspirations was a music video from the 1980s called Cry by Godley and Creme. Here they basically had a bunch of faces that changed but they did it the hard way. They got the cameras to line up and they kept the features as lined up as best as possible but they were still doing dissolves between them.
[video=youtube;KxtPRF6NG7I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxtPRF6NG7I[/video]
Tim Clawson: We talked to Lol Creme about how they did that – they had no money so they didn’t really use visual effects. He said, ‘Well, if you line up the eyes, then you know the faces will all fit on top of each other. And you just have to make some very subtle adjustments.’
From car commercials and Terminator 2 to Michael Jackson
Carl Rosendahl (founder, PDI): We had opened PDI’s L.A. office in 1990 to do feature film work, but were still primarily producing commercials and some broadcast graphics. Our goal from the mid-’80s on was to build the studio to be able to produce our own fully animated feature films. We saw morphing as a great tool to help with film and commercial effects, and had built a tool that enabled us to do it faster and better than anyone else at the time. By the time “Black or White” came along we had already done quite a few commercials with it, and we thought that the video would show it off beautifully.
Thad Beier (R&D manager, PDI): The summer before we got the work for “Black or White,” we had to do some warping for a Plymouth Voyager minivan commercial and we had to design a tool to do it. So Jamie Dixon and I were sitting around one weekend and it was like, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do.’ So we tried probably twenty different things. We were trying to transition from one car to another to show the new version of the car.
[video=youtube;0b939O7dGqQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b939O7dGqQ[/video]
Jamie Dixon: This commercial got out there and everybody loved it. It was a fresh new thing that nobody had ever seen before. So now we were on the map in terms of doing morphing, and the only other place that was doing anything with that at the time was ILM, which had done it in Willow first.
Shawn Neely (technical director, PDI): We were just ‘morphing’ still images at that point but the advancement was that one person could basically do the job that previously it would take an animator and shader and lighter, and a bunch of technical directors to work on – a whole 3D team.
Thad Beier: To do that Plymouth work we ended up drawing a line on this image and a line on that image that corresponded to the feature you wanted it to end up looking like. And we did that for a whole bunch of lines and came up with an algorithm so that we could warp one to the other to make all those lines correspond. And it worked pretty well. I couldn’t quite believe it.
Jamie Dixon: How did we come up with the name morphing? Well, somebody did an article on the car commercial and they asked, ‘What do you guys call this?’ And we came up with the word morphing at that point. ILM called their tool ‘morf’, but when the writer was asking about the car commercial article I said, ‘Well, m-o-r-p-h is how I would spell it.’
Thad Beier: On Willow they had used an algorithm that was far harder to do. Rather than just have a situation where the artist draws the things he or she wants to correspond to, they put up meshes over the whole screen, and people had to drag the meshes to correspond. That was infinitely harder and less precise. The nice thing about drawing individual lines is that you draw a few lines and you look at the morph, and you say, ‘Okay the lines don’t line up,’ so you draw a line over the eyes and then they line up, and you just keep on going and keep adding points or lines until you get everything to move the way you want.
Jamie Dixon: Before we started working on the “Black or White” video, we’d actually also bid on James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Boss Film had been approached by Jim’s company to bid on the transformations of the liquid metal character, the T-1000. And we were there doing this other project and they said, ‘Hey, do you guys know anything about this kind of thing? We thought we could try and figure out how to do that – this feature-based morphing – and the result was an almost parallel evolution with ILM in figuring out a way to do morphing. [ILM ultimately relied on a technique of model interpolation as well as more traditional morphing for the Terminator 2 T-1000 transitions].
Tackling the ‘simple’ scene
Jamie Dixon: Once we were asked to do “Black or White”, we did some face tests. I remember we took a picture of Carl Rosendahl, and he had a kid who was four or five years old and we took a picture of him too and we morphed Carl’s kid into Carl. It was kind of a revelation. You literally could see this kid growing up right in front of your eyes. It had a weirdly strong emotional effect on you when you would see that.
Read the rest of the article here! http://www.cartoonbrew.com/vfx/oral-history-morphing-michael-jacksons-black-white-144015.html
(Gotta support the website that went to the effort to interview them and publish this!
)