Week 2 assignment, Jennifer
Here is my sketch for Week 2. I wanted to try out some technical points: in particular, I tried and failed in Bootcamp to make a beating heart shape. So I wanted to make that work (yay, trigonometry!).
I wanted to make a visual representation of the passage of time without making an actual clock, since the passage of time isn’t dependent on how we’ve defined it. But I did refer to the increments that we use, since that’s how we understand it. So… when the sketch begins, each of the heart and the infinity sign takes one full minute to make a full revolution around the center (they are always on opposite sides of the sketch), and they pulse in opposing two-second beats. These times, however, are internal to the sketch itself, and do not rely on the actual time of day. The user can speed up and slow down the main orbit by pressing the up and down keys, but (like in real life) can’t reverse it, and can’t actually stop it.
The background also changes with the passage of time; however, that is directly linked to the time of day. (As a result, I think the sketch looks better at night).
In a future iteration, I’d like the sketch to be more visually interesting. I had specific animations I wanted to include, which took a little while to make work — and I feel like I understand these trig functions a lot better — but the sketch gets very repetitive very fast. (But maybe that’s in the nature of the passage of time, too).
While I was building this, I wound up making this an early phase, which I like:
I also tested the colors of the background, so you can see the full range without watching the sketch for 24 hours:
