Dorchester — Jun 11th 2019

Andy Prendergast’s talk about morphing one face into another began with us chuckling at his example of morphs between his and Euan’s faces “which he had made earlier”. He used these to stress the importance of keeping a simple and consistent background and face orientation. He set up his MacBook on a table at which each member could sit in turn, illuminated by professional lighting. On the Mac Andy had a simple outline face with lines to highlight key features, eyebrows, nose, chin etc. We positioned ourselves as best we could to aline our features with those on the image. Once in place Andy triggered the Mac’s built in camera to take a picture. Having take our pictures, Andy set about creating morphs using the app MorphX.

Meantime, Euan gave us a 30 minute summary of Apple’s latest 150 minute Developer Conference (‘Dub Dub 2019’). Being a developers’ conference what was being shown will not reach users until the Autumn, but there is plenty to anticipate. Highlights were macOS Catalina, and iPad getting its own operating system including more Mac-like filing, wifi or cable access to external drives, and most impressively, working as a second display for a Mac using “SideCar”. We watched a stunning third party demo using the next macOS Catalina and sidecar with Affinity. “Catalyst” is new Apple developer software which allows app designers to port iOS software to Mac OS very quickly. Apple also introduced their new long awaited and highly accessible Mac Pro which as Euan pointed out with RAM expandable to 1.5 Terabytes, multiple high-powered GPUs and other specification to match is a very serious bit of kit. A matching professional monitor has been introduced to complement it. Here the full Apple Event.

While Euan was telling us about the developer conference, Andy created individual morphs of multiple pairs of members faces which then strung together in Final Cut Pro creating a short, fluid, and highly entertaining movie of members faces being morphed from one to another. Andy made it look easy but there was plenty of creative skill in that brief movie. Copies will be available from David.

Comments

Page 1