[phenoms]

Lindsey Morgan gave an interview about the 100 to the Zoo. No idea who the Zoo is, but there’s a clip of her flexing during the interview that was posted to GirlsWithMuscle. Unfortunately, the clip left out the best part of her flex. I’m unsure if it was a slip or if she was briefly showing off, but she flexed bigger than expected and impressed the interviewers. Thankfully I found a copy of the clip on Youtube and downloaded it. When I went to link to it, they’d doctored it and you don’t see her full flex, so I’ve uploaded it directly as an attachment here for everyone’s viewing pleasure. Watch closely. If you blink, you’ll miss it, but it’s totally worth catching.

(The attachment didn’t work…)

Attaching the video didn’t work. I’ve created a Dtube account to try hosting it. I’ve not tried Dtube before so unsure how well this will work. They’ll only host 480p but I have a 1080p version if anyone can recommend a better host. (And no, not Youtube. Their copyright system won’t permit this despite being completely legal.)

Dtube hosted version:
https://d.tube/v/phenoms00/QmUqY7ZuSU9Uqj71tMhCVYtoQKpp8HJWF11gSXB5hXGWa1

My Deviant Art Page (old stuff):
phenoms.deviantart.com

My Booru Gallery (new stuff):
phenoms.booru.org

Also
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenoms/index00.htm
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenom_fett/index00.htm

[phenoms]

I’m actually rather proud of this creation. While the frame rate of my inserted segment has a subtle but obvious discrepancy from the original, it was good enough and I didn’t think it was necessary to correct.

I created this using only free and open source software on Linux. I abandoned Windows at version 10 as they’d begun data mining. It’s one thing when Google does it. I can use other services, but our personal computers should be off limits (frankly so should our phones).

Anyhow, I think this is good enough for a tutorial of steps I took in creating this…

My Deviant Art Page (old stuff):
phenoms.deviantart.com

My Booru Gallery (new stuff):
phenoms.booru.org

Also
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenoms/index00.htm
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenom_fett/index00.htm

[phenoms]

Tutorial, part 1…

I created this using Gimp, Pitivi, and Audacity. I also used VLC Media Player, and Newpipe on the BlissOS Android emulator inside VirtualBox.

First I downloaded the original video from Youtube using Newpipe which is an Android app. I’d tried downloading it using the Firefox addon Video DownloadHelper, but that didn’t work for this video. Newpipe does a fantastic job every time. The only limitation of Newpipe is that Youtube updates will temporarily break the app at which point the developers update it with a fix, and after upgrading, the app will work again. Not ideal, but the entire thing is a workaround. Newpipe cannot be found on the Google Play store. Instead, get the alternative app store Fdroid and install from there. If you aren’t familiar with Newpipe, Fdroid, or “side loading” apps onto Android, just Google it (or DuckDuckGo it). I run Newpipe on my phone, but I also have it available on my computer. Using VirtualBox, I have an Android emulator called BlissOS installed. When I can’t download videos using the Firefox addon Video DownloadHelper, I’ll use Newpipe in my BlissOS install to get them.

Once I had the video, I played it in VLC Media Player and took a screenshot of Lindsey flexing.

Next, I opened the screenshot in Gimp, first enhanced the sharpness to compensate for video blur, and then used the IWarp filter tool to enhance her arm muscles. I Frankensteined in the pec muscles of Pavla Brantalova and used IWarp to further enhance the pec muscles. Along the way I also had to do various color correction mostly using the Brightness-Contrast and Hue-Saturation tools. Everything is done in layers, and multiple layers are created during the process to preserve various incremental changes which can be a life saver if at certain steps something needs to be done over. Other tools are used in the process as needed. The eraser, blur, smudge, rotation, scale, sheer, and perspective tools are commonly used. Less often, I might use the clone, healing, and dodge/burn tools. There’s no formula that I can describe for which tools or filters to use, or when. The tools and filters mentioned here aren’t a complete list, they’re just some of the more common choices. Each step is a new decision that is often a combination of experience, but is often still trial-and-error.

Once I had my muscle enhanced photo manipulations, of which I often create several versions each of differing muscle size or features, it was time to create morph tweens. Anyone that pays attention, has seen me tirelessly distinguish between manips and morphs. Morphing has become a popular misnomer by laypersons talking about photo manipulations. The problem is, when someone like myself that uses ACTUAL morphing tries to say they did a morph, people misunderstand and confuse the technical term as I intend it for the misnomer of the layperson. Morphing is the use of computer software to generate transitions between images. The in-between transition frames are called tweens, which is simply short for in-betweens. I created the morph tweens using the Video plugin for Gimp. The Video plugin doesn’t come in the default install and must be added. The plugin has it’s own menu option named Video. Under the video menu is the sub-menu Morph in which I selected Morph (Video>Morph>Morph). That opens a new dialog window for which I’d already created a new file with only 2 layers. One layer of the original screenshot, and one of the muscle enhancement I’d created.

The starting image should be on the left, and the ending image on the right. Use swap if you need to change the order. The first thing to do is click the shape button. That places a border of fixed points around the edge of the image. Points inform the program of relationships between the two images. When creating points for a morph, no matter which software you use, begin by creating static (unmoving) points. It’s important to begin with static points because once you begin creating transient points, the program begins making educated guesses and automatically shifting things. Create static points to tell the program which parts should remain unaltered. Transient points create relationships between the parts that will move. Don’t rush your transient points. Take them one at a time. Set a transient point on the starting image, and then move the point to it’s new location on the ending image. It can be tempting to set multiple points on the starting image with the intention to move everything on the ending image afterwards. Don’t. Go one point at a time. You’ll get much better results. Once you’ve created all your points, be sure to save them to a file. Morphs nearly always require several attempts until you refine the transition into what you’re wanting. If you don’t save your points to a file, you’ll be starting over when it doesn’t come out right. Depending on which program you use for morphing, the file extension may differ. In the Video plugin for Gimp, there isn’t a predetermined file extension. I’ll name my points file the same as the image file and change the file extension to “.pnt”. Set “steps” to the number of tween frames that you want. Don’t create too many tweens. Aside from taking longer to generate, too many tweens could crash the program. I’ll usually create between 3 – 12 tweens. Click morph, wait for the tweens to be generated and then preview them as an animation by selecting Filter>Animation>Playback from the menus. The better your morph points, the better your morph. It takes a good eye, some experience, and experimentation and cleanup. You’ll probably have artifacts that need removing. Many artifacts can be reduced or eliminated by adding or moving points. Some require manual cleanup. Overlapping points tend to create the most trouble. For example, Lindsey’s bicep peak crossed the line of the sofa’s backrest. That required manual cleanup using the smudge and eraser tools. See the attached image below for a look at the points dialog window.

Attachments:

• e479bc5b5afce765586c9fb98e05f638

My Deviant Art Page (old stuff):
phenoms.deviantart.com

My Booru Gallery (new stuff):
phenoms.booru.org

Also
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenoms/index00.htm
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenom_fett/index00.htm

[phenoms]

Tutorial, part 2…

Once I had the morph animation how I liked, it was time to save the animation. To save as a gif in Gimp, select Export As from the File menu and just add the .gif file extension. Don’t forget to check the box for As Animation in the GIF dialog window. To save it as a video, select Master Videoencoder from the Video menu, set the frame rate and save the file. Wait for it to generate the video file.

Next open Pitivi. It’s time for some basic video editing. I split the original video into segments. First I shortened it to only the segment I wanted to use and saved that. I opened that segment into Audacity and extracted the audio into an mp3. Back in Pitivi, I cut the clip into 3 segments: A leading segment, the segment to enhance, and a trailing segment. I saved each of the three segments to their own files removing the audio from them. I used the Animated PNG Maker at ezgif.com to split the 2nd segment into 10 png frames. I opened those png files as layers in their own Gimp file and used the lasso tool to select an area which isolated Lindsey’s head, neck, and hair with enough space to allow her head and hair to move all within the bounds of the single lasso’d area. I then inverted the selection and cleared everything from each layer except the head isolation. I used select all and copied each layer, pasting them into the file with Lindsey’s morph layers placing one head layer for each tween layer. I cleaned up each head layer by reducing the opacity to see what I was working on, erasing the excess, restoring the opacity, and finally color correcting each head using the same settings. Finally I merged the head layers with their respective tween layers to bring life to an otherwise rigid image transition. I saved this as a video using the Master Videoencoder.

Back into Pitivi I opened the leading and trailing segments, and the newly created morph segment with the head movements. I placed them together with the morph in the middle, added the audio back in from the mp3 I’d created earlier, and saved the final version that you can view above.

My Deviant Art Page (old stuff):
phenoms.deviantart.com

My Booru Gallery (new stuff):
phenoms.booru.org

Also
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenoms/index00.htm
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenom_fett/index00.htm

[phenoms]

I’ve added a gif animation and 2 pictures to my Booru gallery.

https://phenoms.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=character%3Alindsey_morgan

My Deviant Art Page (old stuff):
phenoms.deviantart.com

My Booru Gallery (new stuff):
phenoms.booru.org

Also
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenoms/index00.htm
www.thevalkyrie.com/picthumb/p/phenom_fett/index00.htm

[Author]

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