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Seas

OpenFrameworks project and pimapper projection


produced by: Jesse Emetulu

Introduction

This project is aiming to represent certain aspects of the sea, a calm before a storm... and the eventual calm again.

Concept and background research

During the Christmas holidays I went out of the country, the place I stayed was near and I could see the entire thing from my window. Initially I was stumped on what to create for my project, when I was stumped I looked out to the sea and the boats passing by. I saw the ripples they were creating, I thought that would be a good start but then I got stumped on how to make an accurate ripple effect, so I made a similar one instead with diagonal lines that intersect. As far as the other effects, I wanted to relate them to the sea… which is why I came up with a whirlpool of sorts that sucks in shapes, then the final effect would release new content in the form of blue colors and shapes.

When initially creating this, I wanted to try have some kind of flow to each piece. But I thought that getting seamless transition between each piece was beyond what I was capable of in the given time. So instead, I settled for a semi-flowing kind of piece with the usage of black boxes to cover the screen. At the start I wanted each piece to be black and white squares and circles, however I found out it got repetitive rather quickly due to the lack of other colors, this is why the last piece uses a variety of shades of blue in order to be more enticing to look at.

 

Technical

All of this was coded using open-frameworks across 3 different sketches. Whilst using a combination of Sine, Noise, and vectors… a lot of the projection is reliant on sine… since I thought the oscillating movements of a sine wave would be more appropriate to represent things such as ripples and whirlpools etc. There is also a variety of separate functions that add on new patterns that contain their own separate movement behaviors. 

Future development

When it comes to developing this further, Ideally, I would like to get the ripple effect coming off an actual single shape that would move up the screen. I initially tried to do this but to no prevail. On top of that I would work on transitions to make them seem smoother so that all the pieces flow together better and feel more connected than they currently are.

Self evaluation

To be honest, when doing this project, I think I had set the scope of it to be too great for what I was capable of at this moment. If I were to attempt something like this in the future, I do believe I could make a better result due to coming to better grips with how Pimapper works and the way open frameworks handles shapes. Even so, I am still proud of what I was able to produce in the end.

References

As far as any referenced material, a piece called “noisy sun” created by Theod had provided a substantial contribution to the final piece in my projection. Thank you