Morphing for Middle Schoolers

For the past two years I've been doing a unit with my Graphic Arts students about morphing. Through a web based activity and projects that involve free software and a digital camera, students become acquainted with skills and knowledge that cross over into other subject areas as well as some real world applications.

The first activity involves students using a website called morphases.com. Here they can mix and match different parts of faces from a database of a variety of photos of different people's faces. In addition to putting together a "human potato head" the web based application also allows users to adjust the different facial features, stretching, shrinking, rotating and positioning them to their liking. This activity becomes a discussion about how technology like this could be used in forensics or to aid detectives who are working with victims of a crime to create a realistic rendering of a suspect.

Next, students participate in a project where they use Sqirlz Morph, a freeware morphing application, to morph two digital photos and create an animation of the transformation. There are two version of this project. In one, my students create a morph of themselves with digital images of celebrities, animals, or objects they find using an internet image search. In the other version, students take digital photos of teacher volunteers and collaborate to creat a continuous sequence of morphs between teachers. This project always results in a carefully moderated discussion on genetics. If you'd like to check out my students teacher morphs from this semester, visit my class website or check out the video located on Classroom 2.0.

A gif animation of the morph created in the screenshot at the beginning of the post is available by clicking the following link. Download jeternator.gif

Resources from this Post

An entry about morphing on Wikipedia

Morphases.com

Sqirlz Morph

A morph project by DMS Graphic Arts Students