About the butterfly "morph"

I was trying to figure out a creative way to bring up the infamous "love letter" which was found in William Desmond Taylor's bungalow during the homicide investigation.  The letter which has been published in the "popular" books about the murder is a phony!  There was a letter, no doubt, and my collection contains a (very poor) photocopy of the actual item.  But the published letter is a "forgery"!

At first, I was merely going to show the letters and leave it at that.  But then I decided to have a little fun with it.  I took the bad photocopy and scanned the image.  I cleaned up the bad portions a bit and then started adding color.  The colors are not accurate, but were chosen to highlight Mary's name on the butterfly.  I then decided to use her "Flying A" studios monogram, as a sort of coccoon.  The images were then changed in aspect to give me the various images that I needed.

At that point, individual .gif's were created from the seperate elements.  After that task was finished, the images were assembled in frames for animation, and the result is what you've seen.  I don't consider myself to be anywhere near "artistic", but I was happy with the results!  The buttons were then easily created from one of the same images!

Below, you will find some of the various elements involved, as well as scans of both letters!

Below is the letter which you would find in the books on the homicide.

And my "poor" photocopy of the actual letter as found by the detectives.

An original autographed publicity letter while Mary was at the "Flying A", showing the monogram used by her at that time.

Below are just a handful of the 60+ individual images used in the animation.  The wings were created seperately so that the aspect could be changed without affecting the "body" of the butterfly.  The green backgrounds were helpful while creating the images, and was ultimately given transparency when the animation was created.

Before and after!

And, the result!

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This page last updated on March 19, 2002