I'm enjoying ICM and I see myself working with it a lot more in the future and so I thought it would be a great idea to make a project which I could submit to a competition outside of ITP. The competition is hosted by "the push" and the topic is "Asian Heroism" and I felt that to me growing up, enjoying media and activities that didn't have hype or universal acceptance was pretty brave. I remember pridefully enjoying my ethnic food, and East Asian media amidst my disapproving peers. For the piece I want to make, I think that an aspect of East Asian culture that seems unique is the exaltation of the cute, child like innocence without inherent fetishization. Most cultures exalt adulthood and maturity, but I feel that in East Asia there is a polar respect for elders and youth. The best place to be is to gain the wisdom of life without losing its joy.
My vision for this piece is pretty complicated. As the child in the foreground is sleeping by the snowman I want fishes, butterflies, and a dragon to be swimming/ flying between the trees in the forest. But the way that they animals are made to look like the props from Chinese lion dance and dragon dance.
The execution of this idea seems incredibly difficult, it requires a lot of code that probably is outside my current ability. First it requires the built objects (fish, dragon, butterflies) and the replication of their natural movements. Then randomized path makers moving horizontally across the page which those objects can follow. I also want to include a constantly moving gradient for the sky and an interactive mouse element. I think I'm going to have to try to enlist the help of my classmates, and make this a group effort.
This week I focused on making a fish that moves naturally and follows my mouse. I did a little bit of research and found out that the code required sin and cos. I never thought I would have to refresh my trigonometry knowledge. The way it works is that the first circle will follow a certain path, but each of the following links in the chain will follow the first link. Then I I want to add illustrated image elements over each circle. It was a struggle to finally code this fish and by the time I had finished it the organization of my code was in total disarray. But seeing that there is a lot of code that repeats I figured that I would need to use loops and arrays to fit the code of the fish under a single function. I also think that learning how to create a class this week will really help bring this project full circle, because I'm hoping that my program will be able to generate new fish. I think I'm going to use the coding lab to try to make my code for this fish more concise.
I think this project is going to take a lot of illustrating, and new code but it's going to be fulfilling when it's finished.
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