“From Washington to Obama in Less than 4 Minutes” is the description line on this little amusement by “HerBunk”, the handle of a YouTube contributor who describes himself as “an old retired guy who likes to play with computers”.
In it, he morphs the likenesses of all of the American presidents to date from one to another in sequence.
The older ones, of course, are represented by paintings, which is one factor that makes it interesting. The filmmaker has tried to use paintings where he could, though some of the more recent presidents are represented by photographs, or manipulated photographs.
The other thing that makes it interesting to me is the fascinating way that morphing between faces points out the way we distinguish faces from one another, and provides a few clues about the nature of portraiture.
For another example, see my post about a video that uses similar morphing, in this case all paintings, to demonstrate The History of Women in Art.
The only disturbing thing about the presidential history morph sequence is that the last few are genuinely creepy.
[Via The Public Reader]
That transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy was particularly disturbing. Hahaha.
Very amusing video.
This is a slower morph than I have seen elsewhere and it has a curious effect: Gradually I realized that there seems to be more time spent morphing than lingering on the true images of the individual people themselves. As a result it feels like one has met a whole bunch of ‘transitional characters’ and just briefly glimpsed the historically true ones in between.
I think a lot of it has to do with transitioning between left facing and right facing poses (political leanings aside).
A fairly interesting thing to watch, not only for the face changes, but for the change in clothing as well. I found myself looking more at what people were wearing around their necks than the actual faces.