Left to his own devices…

So here’s the link to my ICM mid-term in which I sink the Titanic with an iceberg: Titanic. I had hoped to add in a sequence of images from the movie as the great ship sailed to his briny fate, but that proved beyond my abilities at this time as the simple matter of sinking the ship took me far longer to get right than I expected.

What I was able to do is create the icebergs and lifeboats by creating objects of each type, and functions to guide their respective behaviors so they all played their role in this tiny drama. I was able to use texture to get images into the ship in a separate version, and had hoped to put it all together, but I, like the ship, hit an iceberg in trying to get the ship to react to colliding with an iceberg.

The main problem I had was getting the ship to stay sunk once it I called the sink function. Sink is activated by a boolean function that measures the distance between the ship and an iceberg. Once the two come within a given distance (the size of the ship’s hull and the length of an iceberg), the collision function triggers a countdown that trips the sink function, which both slows and sinks the ship and deploys the lifeboats. But the action of sinking the ship and the iceberg’s normal drift–which I didn’t want to interrupt since the ship sank, the iceberg didn’t–caused the two to move apart in sufficient distance to set the ship back on its course. I eventually realized that I needed to add an if statement to the sail function to get the ship to stop sinking and reverse course once it sunk under sea level. That allowed the ship to maintain the distance to the iceberg necessary to keep the sink function operating. If this adjustment had come before I fell asleep, I might have been able to pull off my promised picture show, but unfortunately, the idea occurred to me this morning.

The irony of the situation is not lost on me, but on the bright side, I’ve managed to do what it took James Cameron millions of dollars to do for the cost of a few hours of work. And if the result is not as spectacular as his version of the ship’s story was, at least one doesn’t have to pay $12.00 to see it.

But looking back, I probably shouldn’t have boasted “Not even God Himself could keep me from completing my midterm proposal!”

The lesson, as always, is never tug on the cape of the Big Guy in the Sky.

Here is my first assignment for Dan Shiffman’s ICM, UFD’oh!. Press the space bar and move the mouse to see the light show and if you can make Homer merge with the infinite!

This piece is a tweak of a sketch I worked on this summer while I was tooling around with Dan Shiffman’sLearning Processing that I titled “Bird Dude” about a little bird like alien who could glow when agitated.

Since the actual drawing of Bird Dude was so crude and the point of this week was to draw something using Processing, I decided to try to draw a figure that has inspired me throughout most of my life: Homer Simpson! Homer may not be the brightest person in the world, but things for the most part seem to work out for him, which I believe is because of the fact that despite his selfishness and laziness, he knows deep down that the most important things in one’s life are one’s family and friends…and doughnuts!