It’s been a groundbreaking week in ICM class– we work beyond static objects, and proceed to make moving objects — animation, that is.
Roopa paired me and Michael for the class group project, and we started brainstorming almost right after class. As this is going to be an animation piece, we got a bit excited about what we want to achieve. The possibilities we explored could almost make a mini movie. Michael wanted to take us on a road trip so we can play around with things appearing/disappearing and moving in different directions; I came up with the idea of tennis match that we initiate all kinds of body movements and play around with tennis ball going back and forth and all over…..etc. In the end, we remembered that given the limited time and skills, we have to eliminate many wild ideas and stick with something that is viable. And this is we decided to do — bowling.
The thought process is: as the ball is going down the alley, it gets bigger in size, denoting it is moving towards closer to the pin. The ball will change color or start some special effect when mouse/key is pressed to indicate the occurrence of an event. The most interesting part is, when the ball hits the pin, the pin is frightened and starts shaking.
We spent time on how to manipulate arguments and functions. In the process, we created something looks cool, even though we had no idea what we did to achieve that. As both of us think this animation is going to tell some kind of story, we had to give up the cool stuff that has interesting visual effect.
Bummer. I am still learning how to plug a processing file into WordPress template. Before I know how to do that, here is a snapshot of the final product- (supposedly shaking) pin.
Though there is an unquantifiable amount of new concepts to learn and digest each week, I can’t help but get more curious and excited when watching these pre-class videos. I think Daniel is great in terms of translating codes into plain English. I honestly don’t know how far we will go, but I am looking forward to it.
One comment on “ICM Animation”