LGR Early Look - Elastic Reality: How They Made Animorphs Covers
Added 2019-02-01 00:45:41 +0000 UTCUPDATE: The final version is now posted. Dropped in some footage of the books themselves, fixed some of my dialogue, added a section showing my own "Animorphs cover" coming together like you see in the thumbnail, and generally tweaked a number of segments.
Anyway yeah, lemme know what you think! I've wanted to talk about morphing software for years, and once I found out how it was used for making Animorphs cover art the rest of the video idea came naturally. If this does okay-ish, there's a load of other visual production software I have that I can cover sometime.
Comments
Kotaku has made a news story about this video! <a href="https://kotaku.com/how-those-weird-animorph-book-covers-were-made-1832673876" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://kotaku.com/how-those-weird-animorph-book-covers-were-made-1832673876</a>
2019-02-17 14:50:54 +0000 UTCA sudden increase of subscriptions thanks to the furry community may be expected.
2019-02-08 02:37:30 +0000 UTCI love the idea that you'd break into the Pentagon just to steal retro productivity software. There's a cartoon in that somewhere.
Tim
2019-02-07 20:04:56 +0000 UTCI was a little too old to be the target audience for these books, but I used to see them everywhere. I remember the dolphin one especially. Nice Clint-cat morph, btw. The new covers are...not terribly appealing, are they?
2019-02-05 17:30:25 +0000 UTC"I didn't break into the Pentagon or whatever" Too late! My fanfiction is already written.
Pablo Rodriguez
2019-02-05 16:59:23 +0000 UTCDude, I love visual production software of ye early days and I would love to see more. I didn't grow up with animorphs in my surroundings, but I did plenty of amateurish morphing gifs with amateurish morphing software. Can't remember the name but it had a baby chicken as an example picture.
Marnix
2019-02-05 16:27:03 +0000 UTCOne of my favourite book series ever. I read the crap out of Animorphs when I was in school.
Alyxx the Rat
2019-02-05 16:19:46 +0000 UTCI loved the cover art you did! It definitely looked like it would have fit in among the actual books.
Elizabeth Sullivan-Burton
2019-02-05 15:16:03 +0000 UTCNeat look at what was a really cool effect at the time. Near the end you mentioned keeping legacy equipment around to run this on. I would have been interested to hear more about the gear that you were running it on and what it can run on.
CharlieVictor
2019-02-04 18:37:55 +0000 UTCalways love when you cover those older tools from back when, those are especially enjoyable when you come from the field and see the wonders that colleges before you experienced, wonders of a ton of stuff we take for granted these days to be found in the most basic of tools available.
Ezydenias
2019-02-04 11:25:07 +0000 UTCThe fact you have Animorphs books in your collection warms my heart.
RaptorShadow
2019-02-04 10:32:02 +0000 UTCI remember seeing adds for Morph Plus in the Amiga magazines. I really wanted it but that price tag! **runs to WinUAE **
2019-02-03 19:26:47 +0000 UTCCool! Plus I can't wait to see the intro to that VHS.
Jurassic_Jacob
2019-02-03 15:19:10 +0000 UTCOh and I forgot to say... Loved your morphs you created! The face to computer one was great! Very entertaining!
Sarah
2019-02-02 00:30:54 +0000 UTCYet another video of yours that reminded me of an awesome thing from my childhood! I used to love reading the animorphs books! My mom would buy me the newest animorphs book at the scholastic book Fair that would come to our school library every so often. I read the whole series that way and I loved those covers! I never noticed a difference between the first 3 and the others, I should find them & look closer!
Sarah
2019-02-02 00:29:34 +0000 UTCAh you're correct, will fix
LGR
2019-02-01 22:06:21 +0000 UTCYes, classic Macs are lovely! Anything that runs OS 8 or earlier is my jam.
LGR
2019-02-01 22:06:09 +0000 UTCYeah, I love this. Both delving into this software and the back story of the Animorphs covers (I devoured those books).
Justin T Lee
2019-02-01 16:37:44 +0000 UTCIt's pretty amazing that technology/software was available at that time, and all of it could fit on 2 floppies? Myself or my son never had any Animorphs books that I can rememeber, pretty neat find!
John Piscopo
2019-02-01 15:53:55 +0000 UTCCan we talk more about that Mac? I have a Performa 6200CD and a PowerMac 7300 at home :)
Eric Siegel
2019-02-01 15:18:22 +0000 UTCI'll just leave this here and be on my way... <a href="https://i.imgur.com/gqIYt75.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i.imgur.com/gqIYt75.jpg</a>
Eric Siegel
2019-02-01 15:08:51 +0000 UTCLove the video! My fiancé’s college professor at UW-Madison, Perry Kivolowitz, worked on Elastic Reality. Also it looks like the floppies are high density, not double density.
Nik & Julia Ingrassia
2019-02-01 14:58:17 +0000 UTC<a href="https://archive.org/details/ElasticRealityTutorialVHS" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/ElasticRealityTutorialVHS</a> I bookmarked the LGR archive.org site after he posted the Avon Beauty Vision computer diskette.
Adam Christensen
2019-02-01 14:20:07 +0000 UTCWeird stuff sir. Weird stuff. I imagine that producing a way more convincing morph is a lot more complicated.
Deckard Games
2019-02-01 12:14:55 +0000 UTCI remember using Fantavision on my Apple //c : not as useful, but I think the first commercially available software to make vector transformation. Nice video as always !
2019-02-01 11:24:39 +0000 UTCMe too, where's our reboot of that? With 90s nostalgia where it is, it'd be a natural, and Animorphs was already pretty gritty as it was.
Elizabeth Sullivan-Burton
2019-02-01 11:22:25 +0000 UTCTop video as always.
Richard Shears
2019-02-01 08:29:06 +0000 UTCUhm yeah, We’re gonna need you to upload that VHS somewhere, cos that thing is a goldmine of 90s delight! 😁😎 Top notch as always!
Anders Enger Jensen
2019-02-01 08:04:17 +0000 UTCI always wondered how they made those book covers when I was a kid. I can finally put that cold case to rest now
Myles MAN
2019-02-01 07:27:19 +0000 UTCI had forgot about the books and never heard of the software 😮
PhotoSvein
2019-02-01 04:15:10 +0000 UTCHave you ever run across big commercial packages in the GSA auctions? I worked for several gov entities and in the mid 90s experimenting with various Ray-Tracing & 3D modeling applications like Bryce 3D, I upgraded to bigger animation software such as AutoDesk 3D Studio Max. I remember it came with or I had the mo-cap animation bundle of wire-frames, 3d models & textures. They included a lumbering ogre, a dancing jester, a dinosaur, and a crawling baby. I played with it to assign the matching mo-cap animation to each character... However, someone mapped the jester mo-cap onto the baby and well, the rest is history. dancingbaby.avi #OoghChaka <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWq75eFei2w" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWq75eFei2w</a>
Phil Sowers
2019-02-01 04:13:58 +0000 UTCTwo fquares? What's a(n) fsquare? Can I eat it? Does it require me to do laundry? Haha.
Robert Butler
2019-02-01 04:13:52 +0000 UTCMy first thought was of the Everlong video :D. I like this kind of variety on your channel.
John Covil
2019-02-01 04:06:43 +0000 UTCOh man, I loved Animorphs as a kid! I'm here for the nostalgia, and the reminder of playing with demos to try to make images morph.
Tukaro
2019-02-01 03:29:13 +0000 UTCGonna try! At least for the thumbnail
LGR
2019-02-01 03:16:03 +0000 UTCAre you going to make your own Animorphs cover for the final version? Even if it's not hand-illustrated it would still be cool. (I'm happy to make one for you too.)
Steve Lovelace
2019-02-01 02:48:27 +0000 UTCNice! Psyched to share it :)
LGR
2019-02-01 01:28:52 +0000 UTCOh nice! Amusingly I have a separate program for DOS called Metamorf that does basically the same. I assume it could be inspired by that.
LGR
2019-02-01 01:27:26 +0000 UTCHope you still cover the topic, I know we talked about it some when you dropped by my place a while back! Don't have those two you mentioned, but I still have a few more Windows morph packages to maybe talk about.
LGR
2019-02-01 01:23:48 +0000 UTCYeah it's crazy how *specialized* graphics software could be back in the day. One costly program, one main function!
LGR
2019-02-01 01:18:56 +0000 UTCHappy to hear it, I love this stuff! Hope to someday take a look back at early versions of Photoshop, 3DS Max, Print Shop Deluxe, old Windows icon-making programs etc
LGR
2019-02-01 01:18:15 +0000 UTCAs someone involved in the graphics field, I love all your videos on non-game software and hardware. Kai's Power Goo, the recent Kodak vid etc
2019-02-01 01:12:07 +0000 UTCI used a similar program to this many many years ago. It's a lot of fun trying to get the vectors to match in just the right way, and the hilarious results.
Stephen Staver
2019-02-01 01:08:56 +0000 UTCI’ve done stuff like this before in after effects. I couldn’t imagine spending 900 dollars on a program just for one effect, thank god for after effects and it’s free plugins
Zachary Outen
2019-02-01 01:05:26 +0000 UTCOh jeeze that's lovely. Deluxe Paint on the Amiga had something similar but far more primitive for melting images together with animation. Here's a sample of that: <a href="https://youtu.be/KybIkyilCQI?t=2447" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/KybIkyilCQI?t=2447</a> I love how simple older animation packages were to do just some ridiculous things.
JennaKay
2019-02-01 01:02:26 +0000 UTC
