How to morph an object

Back in the day (like late elementary school/ early middle school) there was a book series "Animorphs".  The books were about a group of teenagers that got the ability to transform into animals (there were aliens involved as well but that's not relevant to this post)  I never really read the books, my older brother was more into them than I was. What I did think was really cool was the covers of the books.

Each book cover had one of the protagonists turning into a different animal and it was one of those hologram pictures, where from a particular angle you can see only certain of the images. I was pretty young at the time but I always enjoyed those covers. 

Later there was a television show on nickelodeon that only lasted a season or two. One of the effects on the show was the characters turning into an animal. Sometimes these were shown and sometimes they were implied by shadows and sounds. 

At the time I thought this was really impressive. Now, I know that they probably used after effects and that this doesn't even look that difficult (although I haven't tried it yet) 

I also found this tutorial on YouTube that shows how to morph objects. It is probably similar to what was used in the show. Enjoy

Face Morphing in Moving Objects

This week I know Auturo spoke about looking at all the various video tutorials on video copilot. However I found my inspiration for this week's blog through a very unexpected source. I am willing to admit that during this weeks episode I was impressed by one of the special effects that occurred during one of the music performances, more specifically Black or White originally done by Michael Jackson. The editors of this episode were inspired by the originally Michael Jackson video to actually morph the faces of the actors into one another as they were singing. I thought this was absolutely crazy and wanted to immediately figure out how they did this or if there was anyway I could simply replicate this effect in After Effects. Here is the link to the video unfortunately I couldn't get a shorten version but if you want to skip right to the special effect it starts at 1:42:

After looking up all different information on how to actually how to do this animation I found out that the editors most likely used an additional effect in after effects known as RE: Flex Morph which always you to take two different moving objects and morph between the two. I found this really interesting and found a simple tutorial that gives step-by-step introductions on how to create this effect. In my upcoming projects I am extremely interested in incorporating this effect and seeing if I can complete it as effectively as the editors of Glee. Here is the tutorial for the effect and a link to morph  still images into various objects such as other people, animals, etc:

This is the link as well:
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/zwar_chris/morph.php