LGR Early Look - Elastic Reality: How They Made Animorphs Covers

Kotaku has made a news story about this video! <a href="https://kotaku.com/how-those-weird-animorph-book-covers-were-made-1832673876" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://kotaku.com/how-those-weird-animorph-book-covers-were-made-1832673876</a>

A sudden increase of subscriptions thanks to the furry community may be expected.

Tim

I love the idea that you'd break into the Pentagon just to steal retro productivity software. There's a cartoon in that somewhere.

I was a little too old to be the target audience for these books, but I used to see them everywhere. I remember the dolphin one especially. Nice Clint-cat morph, btw. The new covers are...not terribly appealing, are they?

Pablo Rodriguez

"I didn't break into the Pentagon or whatever" Too late! My fanfiction is already written.

Marnix

Dude, I love visual production software of ye early days and I would love to see more. I didn't grow up with animorphs in my surroundings, but I did plenty of amateurish morphing gifs with amateurish morphing software. Can't remember the name but it had a baby chicken as an example picture.

Alyxx the Rat

One of my favourite book series ever. I read the crap out of Animorphs when I was in school.

Elizabeth Sullivan-Burton

I loved the cover art you did! It definitely looked like it would have fit in among the actual books.

CharlieVictor

Neat look at what was a really cool effect at the time. Near the end you mentioned keeping legacy equipment around to run this on. I would have been interested to hear more about the gear that you were running it on and what it can run on.

Ezydenias

always love when you cover those older tools from back when, those are especially enjoyable when you come from the field and see the wonders that colleges before you experienced, wonders of a ton of stuff we take for granted these days to be found in the most basic of tools available.

RaptorShadow

The fact you have Animorphs books in your collection warms my heart.

I remember seeing adds for Morph Plus in the Amiga magazines. I really wanted it but that price tag! **runs to WinUAE **

Jurassic_Jacob

Cool! Plus I can't wait to see the intro to that VHS.

Sarah

Oh and I forgot to say... Loved your morphs you created! The face to computer one was great! Very entertaining!

Sarah

Yet another video of yours that reminded me of an awesome thing from my childhood! I used to love reading the animorphs books! My mom would buy me the newest animorphs book at the scholastic book Fair that would come to our school library every so often. I read the whole series that way and I loved those covers! I never noticed a difference between the first 3 and the others, I should find them &amp; look closer!

LGR

Ah you're correct, will fix

LGR

Yes, classic Macs are lovely! Anything that runs OS 8 or earlier is my jam.

Justin T Lee

Yeah, I love this. Both delving into this software and the back story of the Animorphs covers (I devoured those books).

John Piscopo

It's pretty amazing that technology/software was available at that time, and all of it could fit on 2 floppies? Myself or my son never had any Animorphs books that I can rememeber, pretty neat find!

Eric Siegel

Can we talk more about that Mac? I have a Performa 6200CD and a PowerMac 7300 at home :)

Eric Siegel

I'll just leave this here and be on my way... <a href="https://i.imgur.com/gqIYt75.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i.imgur.com/gqIYt75.jpg</a>

Nik &amp; Julia Ingrassia

Love the video! My fiancé’s college professor at UW-Madison, Perry Kivolowitz, worked on Elastic Reality. Also it looks like the floppies are high density, not double density.

Adam Christensen

<a href="https://archive.org/details/ElasticRealityTutorialVHS" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/ElasticRealityTutorialVHS</a> I bookmarked the LGR archive.org site after he posted the Avon Beauty Vision computer diskette.

Deckard Games

Weird stuff sir. Weird stuff. I imagine that producing a way more convincing morph is a lot more complicated.

I remember using Fantavision on my Apple //c : not as useful, but I think the first commercially available software to make vector transformation. Nice video as always !

Elizabeth Sullivan-Burton

Me too, where's our reboot of that? With 90s nostalgia where it is, it'd be a natural, and Animorphs was already pretty gritty as it was.

Richard Shears

Top video as always.

Anders Enger Jensen

Uhm yeah, We’re gonna need you to upload that VHS somewhere, cos that thing is a goldmine of 90s delight! 😁😎 Top notch as always!

Myles MAN

I always wondered how they made those book covers when I was a kid. I can finally put that cold case to rest now

PhotoSvein

I had forgot about the books and never heard of the software 😮

Phil Sowers

Have you ever run across big commercial packages in the GSA auctions? I worked for several gov entities and in the mid 90s experimenting with various Ray-Tracing &amp; 3D modeling applications like Bryce 3D, I upgraded to bigger animation software such as AutoDesk 3D Studio Max. I remember it came with or I had the mo-cap animation bundle of wire-frames, 3d models &amp; textures. They included a lumbering ogre, a dancing jester, a dinosaur, and a crawling baby. I played with it to assign the matching mo-cap animation to each character... However, someone mapped the jester mo-cap onto the baby and well, the rest is history. dancingbaby.avi #OoghChaka <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWq75eFei2w" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWq75eFei2w</a>

Robert Butler

Two fquares? What's a(n) fsquare? Can I eat it? Does it require me to do laundry? Haha.

John Covil

My first thought was of the Everlong video :D. I like this kind of variety on your channel.

Tukaro

Oh man, I loved Animorphs as a kid! I'm here for the nostalgia, and the reminder of playing with demos to try to make images morph.

LGR

Gonna try! At least for the thumbnail

Steve Lovelace

Are you going to make your own Animorphs cover for the final version? Even if it's not hand-illustrated it would still be cool. (I'm happy to make one for you too.)

LGR

Nice! Psyched to share it :)

LGR

Oh nice! Amusingly I have a separate program for DOS called Metamorf that does basically the same. I assume it could be inspired by that.

LGR

Hope you still cover the topic, I know we talked about it some when you dropped by my place a while back! Don't have those two you mentioned, but I still have a few more Windows morph packages to maybe talk about.

LGR

Yeah it's crazy how *specialized* graphics software could be back in the day. One costly program, one main function!

LGR

Happy to hear it, I love this stuff! Hope to someday take a look back at early versions of Photoshop, 3DS Max, Print Shop Deluxe, old Windows icon-making programs etc

As someone involved in the graphics field, I love all your videos on non-game software and hardware. Kai's Power Goo, the recent Kodak vid etc

Stephen Staver

I used a similar program to this many many years ago. It's a lot of fun trying to get the vectors to match in just the right way, and the hilarious results.

Zachary Outen

I’ve done stuff like this before in after effects. I couldn’t imagine spending 900 dollars on a program just for one effect, thank god for after effects and it’s free plugins

JennaKay

Oh jeeze that's lovely. Deluxe Paint on the Amiga had something similar but far more primitive for melting images together with animation. Here's a sample of that: <a href="https://youtu.be/KybIkyilCQI?t=2447" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/KybIkyilCQI?t=2447</a> I love how simple older animation packages were to do just some ridiculous things.

My brother loves this idea, he is a big fan of the Animorphs book series. Can't wait to see the finished product :)