Project A: Acid Leaves

https://jasonlee557.github.io/CCLab/my-first-project/

2023 

Creative Coding by Jiasheng Li (Jason)

The leaves migrate with the blowing wind to survive. The audience can press the mouse to blow a wind and release the mouse to stop the wind.

The Elevator Pitch

Not only do the animals migrate, but also the plants do! The project establishes an environment where the leaves falling are from a polluted area with acid rains and they will migrate to a sunny and safe environment with the wind blowing by the audience pressing the mouse.

Abstract

Acid Leaves is about leaves migrating from a toxic environment to a safe environment. The leaves are red by default due to the pollution from the acid rain while they will be green and healthy again after migrating to the safe zone. The project aims to create a creature and embed a narrative and interaction with the audience in it. The audience can interact with the project by pressing the mouse to blow the wind and releasing the mouse to stop the wind. It resembles the process of exhalation, pressing the mouse compared to blowing. 

Reflection

1) Process: Design and Composition

It costs you something to be here, that makes you some kind of immigrant.

– Past Lives (2023)

The concept is inspired by the line in my recent favorite movie Past Lives (2023) directed by Celine Song. Though I am not an immigrant, I thought about migration and this quotation. On the other hand, the project requires me to create a kind of creature. So, why not make plants migrate? 

In terms of visualization, I was so ambitious that I wanted to include elements from every week. I tried to create two environments, one toxic and one healthy, where the leaves falling change between polluted and healthy states due to being blown into different environments.

In my project, the core elements are trees, rain, leaves, and sun. For the trees, I drew inspiration from Nina Wang’s mini-project 1. I used her tree structure as a reference and made it iterate. During Interaction Day, I noticed Ada Chen made a meteor shower in her Space Duck draft, which influenced me to add the acid rain in the toxic environment to make the pollution explicit. 

The interaction is mainly the wind blowing by the audience pressing the mouse. At first, the movement was too fast and not “natural”. In the later version, the movement is smoother and slower. I also cut out my plans of making syndromes such as measles, which is not practical. 

In conclusion, the overall process is a journey to make my articulation much more visualized and explicit to the audience. By establishing the background and making the effects smoother, the project became easier for the audience to understand. 

2) Process: Technical

Because this was a mid-term project, I wanted to deploy skills learned every week as much as possible. In the trees, I used function() to initialize the template and integrated the trees into the forest by constantly calling the function. The trees used the mini project1 knowledge of drawing with codes. The sun’s rays are made by angular movements, which contain a loop. For the leaves, I tried out arc.

The main problems that I encountered were the rain and the wind. 

 //toxic rain
push();
for (let i = 0; i < 500; i++) {
let rainX = random(width / 2);
let rainY = random(height);
stroke("red");
line(rainX, rainY, rainX, rainY + 20);
}
pop();

I tried out the rain in only one column with random. But later on, I turned to Ada Chen, my classmate, she told me to use a loop. Thanks for the help. 

As for the wind, Professor Godoy suggested I use Noise instead of simply changing the x. Thanks Teaching Assistant Cissy for her detailed explanation. She also pointed out the nuances between mouseIsPressed once and mouseIsPressed constantly, which impacted my project narrative. 

//falling leave
x = x + 5 * sin(ld) - 5 + noise(xoff) * 10; //noise
y = y + random(5);
ld = ld + 0.1;
arc(x, y, 100, 100, ld, ld + PI / 3);

//wind
if (mouseIsPressed) {
speedX = random(-15, 20);
x = x + speedX;
y = y + random(5);
}

3) Reflection and Future Development

In retrospect, I am really satisfied with the structure, the variety of coding and the narrative while I think certain effects after the interaction and variety of situations could be more developed. My presentation had a nice reaction from the audience which showed my narrative went well. 

During the feedback session, IMA fellows and my classmates suggested I improve the details and the interaction. Joey Yang was confused by the shape of the leaves as if they were pizza, which she recommended be changed by using curves. Professor Godoy advice me to think more about the time it took for the leaves to recover instead of making them cured instantly after crossing the border. Professor Eric Jiang commented that the wind was “not natural enough” for the reappearance of the leaves from the same position. He also suggested the background transition could be less apparent. Fatima Kazim proposed that the wind could impact the rain as well. 

I appreciate all these suggestions and I do think they are all valid. In the future, I think I should continue to draw inspiration from nature. As for the coding, the interaction and the effects after the interaction could be more complexed. I was only limited to the mindset that one interaction could only have one outcome. I should make the outcome more vibrant and colorful.