Conan O'Brien has a bit he does every few weeks called If They Mated where he shows two celebrity photos and then combines them into a hilarious photo of what their offspring might look like. Of course, the results are comical: Burt Reynold's eyebrows and mustache planted on a Martha Stewart-looking creature. If Conan's art director isn't using FantaMorph to do these, he or she uses something very similar.
When you start FantaMorph, you can choose to create a morph or a warp. A morph is a movie between two or more images, while a warp just works with one image. I am reviewing the FantaMorph SE version, so I am limited to working with two images. With two images you can do interesting things like create a before-and-after animation on a website to show landscaping improvements. My first test, though, was decidedly less serious. My friend wanted a morph animation of himself and Anthony Michael Hall, whom I've said he looks like.
[See image 1 (amh.gif)]
To create the morph, once you have two images loaded, you simply start adding dots onto the two images that show the important points of the animation. For example, you might place the first dot on the left eye in the left image and then move the corresponding dot to the same position on the left eye on the right image. Just rinse and repeat until you have a smooth animation. A third image will start showing the animation as you make your edits.
[See image 2 (kayleen.jpg)]
At any point you can take a snapshot of an in-between frame or save your work as an animation; formats include an animated GIF, an AVI movie, a Flash movie, a screensaver, a standalone EXE, or just a sequence of images. The animated GIFs are high quality, so you need to watch your image dimensions or you will find yourself with a 10 MB file.
Besides morphs you can create warps, by just moving points around in a single image animation. I tried growing my ears:
[See image 3 (ears.gif)]
