Morph

Morph

Let’s talk about morphing—that’s right, that craze of the
early ’90s, the breakout success on Michael Jackson’s Black
or White video by PDI.
Thing is, morphing can come in handy, without being so
blatant and obvious, if you consider it a concealing tool.
It’s useful when you don’t want anyone to notice a transition
between two objects or even a transition between one
object and itself at a different point in time. Or heck, go
crazy morphing together members of your extended family
to see if you look anything like the result.
What exactly is a morph? It is, quite simply, a combination
of two warps and a dissolve. Given two images, each with
a corresponding shape (say, the features of the face), you
warp the source image’s face shape to the face shape of
the target, warp the target from something that matches
the source to its face shape, fading the target in over the
source.
After Effects has no tool called “Morph,” and for a long
time, the program offered no good way to pull off this
effect. However Reshape is a warping tool that lays the
groundwork for simple morphs. You can build these up
into more complex morphs, with separate individual transitions
occurring to create an overall transition.