The revised face morph

After the face morph created on Adobe After Effects did not work out as originally planned, we realised we had to work hard in researching new software which could create the face morph for the last creative and horrifying push in our opening. We did not want to give up on the face morph idea as we though the build up of tension throughout would end disappointingly if it did not result in a terrifying and unexpected image. Therefore we came up with some new ideas for creating the face morph.
We discussed some ideas about using imovie to fade clips together to try and create our desired effect however after playing around this did not have the edge that we required and so we looked for more software which could assist us.
We eventually found some new technology which none of us had used before called FantaMorph and this looking promising. I downloaded the software and played around with it many times, sharing to the group the outcome of the experiments in order for us to decide whether we wanted to use it or not in our opening.

 This is one of the first attempts at the face-morph. To begin with it was difficult working out how to use the software and it did not seem very successful initially as the transition between the first frame and the last was a big jerky and did not look very realistic.

I carried on trying and slowly learned how to use all the functions of the software. The second attempt was better as the transition was much smoother and could hopefully come across as a believable face morph. However I knew as the exported video was portrait it would not look very smooth amongst the rest of our landscape oriented footage. However the last frame of the scary face had very narrow dimensions and this meant that I needed to edit the second picture to make it landscape for the exported video to be able to work in imovie.

Image 1

Image2

Image 3

I edited the second image in GIMP photo editor by adding a wider black background. This meant that I could successfully merge it with the landscape still of our footage. I matched all the points on the face in the first photo (image 1) with the points on the face in the seconds photo (image 2). Image 3 showed a preview of what the photos looked morphed together and I like this as I could see that it made her skin look much more aged and her face more demonic and angry.

 I then made sure that I saved the final video as FULL HD so that it looked crisp and clear amongst the rest of our footage.

I then had to edit the face morph in imovie to make sure we got across the effect we wanted and it looked smooth and believable among the rest of the footage. I began by dragging the face morph into the project area.

Looking at the face morph, I decided that the final frame did not look very appropriate as the background was black and so I decided to split the clip before it reached the last few frames. This meant that the face would be angry, aged and demonic however the background of the cemetery would still be intact. I split the clip by finding the point where I wanted to split it, right clicking and then selecting 'select clip'. I then deleted the final frames which I did not need.

We decided that the face morph was a bit too fast to be able to see the full effect and so I slowed it down a little. I did this by double clicking the clip and then in the 'clip editor' selecting a slower option on the speed timeline. I chose a slightly slower 70%. I found this speed to be perfect because although it was fast enough to shock the audience it wasn't so fast that you could not see what was going on.