February 27, 2005
Registering Faces
Today’s discussion: REGISTERING FACES
If we want to record faces, and if we want to somehow put them together, we may wish to think about registration.
Remember that what makes the Disney Talking Head work is that the image of the eyes fall into the eye area of the mask-shaped screen, the lips onto the lip area, etc. Some slop is OK but too much ruins an otherwise awesome illusion.
The best way to register faces is by lining up the eyes (i.e., by moving one image in x and y and rotating and zooming). Since eyes are perfect circles, this can be done perfectly. Our own Peggy Weil did some incredible work on this for her graduate thesis. When such registered faces are combined in space (like superimposed) or time (like fast editing), the result is magic.
An even better way is to first line up the eyes, then line up the horizontal mouth line (i.e., by scaling vertically). Check out a 1988 rock video by Godley & Creme called “Cry.” The only hit I could find supports only Windows see "www.vh1.com/artists/az/godley_creme/artist.jhtml". Can somebody copy it?
Does anyone know anything about doing these things automatically? I think it’s doable in Jitter.
Posted by naimark at 01:15 PM | Comments (3)