Coco Photography

Ink to Life

The main subject I chose to morph is a fictional character from a comic book. I decided to work with the character in the comic book verse and movie verse because I wanted to emphasize the idea of bringing fictional worlds into real life.

 

The personal idea that is reflected in this work is the idea of living in the dream. To be more specific, another reason why I explored this idea of bringing fiction to life is because the actor (Andrew Garfield) stated that he always wanted to become the character when he was a little kid. And now, he is living his dream because he gets to wake up every day knowing that he is playing his childhood hero.

 

I intend my work to be interpreted as a therapeutic reading because my work reflects more of a personal meaning for me. As a creative individual, I have always cherished the idea of bringing ideas and fiction to life hence explains why I am a fan of movies and why I want to become an animator. On the other hand, there is also a personal meaning for the actor because I wanted to emphasize how Andrew idolized Spider-man when he was little and now he gets to play his hero and become a hero to other kids as well.

 

The challenges of approaching the final result of the morphed portrait was exploring different ways of transforming the comic drawing to the face. I have tried using the technique of warping and perspective on Photoshop, however after animating the transitions into a gif, it was choppy and no smooth transition. Therefore, in the end I took a different approach to achieve the smooth transition. However, to achieve the smooth transition, I had to save every little detail I did to the photo. So in the end I had to animate over 50 photos.

 

I am most proud of choosing two photos that look alike to one another. When I placed the photo of the actor on top of the photo of the comic character, all features of the face was aligned with the comic photo. Therefore, I am proud of looking for the perfect photos to work with because I spent a lot of time looking for the right photos to work with.

 

If I had more time, I would have tried using a different program or technique of transitioning the comic picture to the actor’s photo because it would create more of an interesting feel towards it. For example, instead of aligning the two faces exactly on top of each other, I would have one face smaller than the other and take each feature and make it gradually merge into the final look.