Morphing in the 1990s
The first movie, “Distalless expression in larval wing imaginal discs in both Junonia sp. and Bicyclus sp. is correlated with the eyespots in adult wings”, morphs still images of developing wing spots in two different genus of nymphalid butterflies the Junonia (shown above, commonly known as the “buckeye”) and the Bicyclus (commonly known as the “Bush brown”). He does this by morphing embryo wing discs stained with fluorescing anti-distalless antibodies into adult butterfly wings. The movie is intended to clearly bring home the correlation between Dll staining spots and eye spot formation.
Although the images of this movie are highly specialized, in that they involve confocal micrographs of fluorescing caterpillar tissue, the movie software is little more than off the shelf personal computing image manipulation software: Photoshop, Adobe Premier, Maya, and some commercial morphing software. The technician responsible for the morphing sequence of this film, Eric Hazen, wrote at length on the process of making these movies in the book chapter “Morphing Confocal Images and Digital Movie Production”, where he describes why morphing is useful for biology and how to go about doing it on your computer. “Visualizing change over time is essential to understanding biological events such as embryogenesis and development.” The problem, however, was that this sort of visualization wasn’t always possible, as many images needed fixed, stained, and dissected tissues in order to visualize needed to specific molecules or tissues with clarity and specificity. “Computer technology”, “however provides an alternative method for simulating changeover time: a process called morphing, which was originally developed for the movie and advertising industries to create visual effects.” This process takes two (or more) images and creates a series of in between images, such as the “tweening” we saw described above with key-frame animation. The animator creates a series of motion paths that allows the computer to simulate change “change over time from one still image o another still image . . .”. This, then, allows the computer to model the intermediary stages of development” or all the changes that need to happen to move from one image to the next. Hazen is careful to point out though, that the same ease of visualization of change that makes morphing useful for educational purposes might restrict it from being a good source for a scientific analysis of the images themselves as the parameters for changing the image are the vectors between points as opposed to the wholly biological.
It is very important to remember that this technique is a product of the advertising industry and movie special effects. On the right, is a scene from the 1991 movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This film used morphing special effects to wow its audiences with the transformation of the human-like appearance of the T 1000 robot into pliable and nearly-indestructible liquid metal. This type of transformation was criticized by some scholars of animation as representative of the 1990s, where neo-liberal economies promoted rootless and nomadic identities. The implications of this critique for rading the movie from Carroll's lab suggests that scientific work visualizing transformation shouldn't take short cuts. The profound moment of biological change needs to be documented as changes across chemical and biological scales and not just as a technique of visualization.
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- From Sensory Bristles to the Spots on a Butterfly's Wing Phillip Thurtle