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Computational Media 9.12.19

Pat Con No-Face

For this assignment I teamed up with Jan. We decided early on that we would literally combine our week 2 compositions by adding my beanie to her No-Face sketch so it was very clear that it was a collaboration between the two of us.

Getting the beanie onto the sketch was more of an issue than we initially thought it would be. We wanted to retain the movement of the figure that Jan had in Week 2 and I didn’t want to have to fully resketch the beanie, and that proved to be an issue. We thought that we could just modify the scale of the beanie , throw it on the figure and add the mouseX value to keep the movement with the figure. What we didn’t anticipate was that the scale modification would also change the movement speed. To remedy that, I created a beanieSpeed value that I just kept adjusting until we had something that matched the speed of the figure. I wish I knew how to calculate that speed without simply guessing, but it wasn’t too painful this way.

The next goal on my end was to have a background that changed color every time we opened it. I thought that I could set a global variable on random, but it seems that it wasn’t a valid move to make. When I set the values to random under the draw function, we ended up getting a flashing mess that was more EDM party than it was cute and novel, so we scrapped that idea for now.

Seeing that the scale function messed with the speed, I thought it would be cute to add a little baby version of No Face that kind of trailed behind the figure, or looked like it was following it from inside the room, so I added that as well.

Jan added a mouseIsPressed statement that allowed the user to click the mouth of the No Face wide open or just the default kind-of open pose. I thought about adding the baby No Face to that function, but it seemed a bit much.

Jan also incorporated the trailing effect that Ray showed us with his stars last week. There’s a slight issue in that she only wanted the black part of the figure to trail off but she was also getting the white of the mask trailing. The white trails lasted a bit longer so it created a look that we initially going for, but we kept nonetheless.

View the p5 sketch here

Note: This may not be the final sketch as Jan may do work in the time that this post was written.

Screen Record of Jan’s No Face sketch with Patrick’s Beanie and a baby No Face added.