Metamorphmagus

Student: Marvin Senarath
Work:Metamorphmagus
Genre: Specialeffects, Animation
Length: 00:00:19; 00:00:20
Format: Video
Production technique: Artbreeder (Generative Adversarial Networt), Adobe Premiere Pro
Link: https://artbreeder.com/  

Welcome to my final contribution for this scientific seminar.
I created two short animation with “Artbreeder”, which is a morphing tool enabled with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). I call the whole outcome “Metamorphmagus”. A metamorphmagus is a witch or wizard with the rare ability to change their physical appearance through sheer will alone. Instead of sheer will or being a wizard I used the website and a little bit of my phantasy.

In the beginning a watched some tutorials to get to know this website and tried it out myself. It was not hard to get into it or creating something. Then I had to think about possible ways to use this program as I realised the high amount of possibilities. For the first clip I used pictures of myself from different ages. This was a simple idea to create an interesting clip and seeing myself “evolving”. Important was to have kind of portraits, so that artbreeder can work with that. On technical side I only took use of the morphing. First I had to upload a photo, sometimes twice and crop so it fit better. In the second step I had to decide on which transition I want to use and the seconds between each photo. I used 2 second between each photo. After Artbreeder rendered this Clip I edit it a bit in premiere pro. It is clear to see that if the distance between each age is lower the transition looks more realistic. And even the external appearance makes a difference e.g. the hairs or a beard.

Pictures:

The second clip is a little bit more interesting. At first I had to create the pictures you can see right from the text. For that I use the tool in Artbreeder “Edit-Genes”. This allows me to give some parameters on my picture, e.g. facial hair, gender, age, Asian, black, white etc. I was not sure what to create but I started with a photo of myself and edit my genes and ended up having some stereotypes. Me being “Asian”, “black” etc. It sounds gross but it is like the means for the purpose in this case. For the clip I want it to go back every time I reached the “new me” and start again with the transformation. This was about trying something and start over again, if the face was not really that what I want to have. But in the end I am really happy with the outcome.

Pictures: