Elastic Reality

» see elasticreality.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the effect got here long before the software did, and it got here on television. for a stretch of the early nineties you could not sit through a commercial break in turkey or anywhere else without something turning into something else, a face into another face, a car into an animal. i was eight or nine. the effect was everywhere and the tool behind it was completely invisible, which is the normal relationship between a child and a piece of professional software.

the company was asdg, in madison, wisconsin, and it had spent the eighties making amiga software: scanner drivers, and an image processing package called art department professional that amiga people took seriously. in 1992 it shipped morphplus for the amiga. morphplus grew into elastic reality, which got its first feature film credit on in the line of fire in 1993. asdg thought enough of the product to rename the whole company after it in 1994.

the technical idea is the reason it won and it is simple enough to say out loud. most morphing tools of the period made you lay a mesh of control points over both pictures and drag those points until they corresponded to each other. elastic reality had you draw shapes instead, outlines around an eye or along a jawline, and it warped from shape to shape. a mesh fights you the moment the two images are not the same shape to begin with, which they never are.

by 1994 it was the default morphing system in film and broadcast, running on sgi workstations, and it went into hundreds of productions. the mask and batman forever are the ones people remember. the credit that stays with me is the animorphs book covers, those five-panel sequences of a kid turning into an animal, made in this program by the illustrator david b. mattingly, which is very likely the largest single body of elastic reality output anybody has ever looked at.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

morphing had a shelf life of roughly four years and it burned through the whole thing in public. it went from something that made an audience sit up, in the black or white video and terminator 2 in 1991, to something that turned up in local car dealership commercials by the middle of the decade. by 1997 putting a morph in a serious production was a way of announcing that the production was not.

the software did not get worse while this was happening. really though, it got an academy award: perry kivolowitz and garth dickie took a technical achievement award in 1996 for shape-based warping and morphing, which is the exact invention that made it good in the first place. the problem was never the tool. it was that the tool did one thing very well, and that one thing stopped being wanted.

~ what replaced it ~

avid bought the company in march 1995. avid then bought softimage in 1998 and the product was rebranded softimage elastic reality, which is usually what happens to something shortly before it is discontinued, and it was discontinued in 1999.

what became of the technique is more interesting than what became of the company. shape-driven warping did not die. it went inside other things and stopped being a feature anyone buys separately, which is the ordinary fate of a good idea that got sold as a product. every compositing package has warping tools in it now and none of them are the headline. the effect itself came back too, without a name attached: the thing a phone does to a face in real time is a descendant of exactly this work, running at thirty frames a second on a battery, and nobody thinks of it as an effect at all.

elasticreality.com refuses the connection. the internet archive was offline on the day i went looking, so i cannot tell you what the last version of the site said, and that is where this one has to stop.

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