A flower in the wind
I wanted to make a simple narrative of a flower in a cartoonised style, inspired by children's cartoons and storybooks. this peice is a simple narrative of a lonely little flower from day to night time in the wind and rain.
Produced by: Jade Hall-Smith
Summary of 'A Flower in the wind'
My project is called 'A Flower in the wind' and it is a simple cartoon inspired animation of a flower in the wind and rain from day to nighttime. I used functions such as ofRotate, ofGetElapsedTimef() as well as ofPoint to animate the piece and have it change every few seconds. I have always been interested in nature and often like going for walks, or riding my bicycle in the summer and it was nice to come up with a concept that showed nature. Upon going on a trip to see my niece and nephew, I got the inspiration from watching cartoons with them. I liked the simplicity of the animations and cartoons and thought I could recreate a little story through Openframeworks. The piece has several changes- the flower rotates. The leaves move up and down symmetrically, so it looks as though there is some wind, the background changes colour depending on the time and the sun moves. The idea is to create a simplistic animation of a flower for that children can understand. Coming from a digital arts background and working with such software such as Adobe photoshop and illustrator, in which the I could create vector images, I wanted to bring in this concept to OpenFrameworks, creating a vector style animation with simplicity yet have several different noticeable changes. I chose a simple colour scheme too, using child friendly colours, based on the cartoons that younger children watch. The flower animation was borrowed and modified from Denis Perevalov’s ‘Mastering Openframesworks: Creative Coding Demystified’ book. Previously, I did not know how to create or use control points so I read the book but I modified it and added to it to create this little story for children.
References
Perevalov , D. (2013) Mastering openFrameWorks: Creative Coding Demystified. Birmingham : PACKT Publishing Ltd.
Perevalov, D. (2013). ofDemystified. Available: https://github.com/firmread/ofDemystified. Last accessed 22 Dec 2016.
