DESCRIBE THE PROJECT
This project is a coded animation based on a scene from the short television miniseries, Over the Garden Wall, and depicts two frogs in dapper red suits playing upright bass and accordion respectively. I used the software Processing to create both the art and motion.
DESCRIBE YOUR MOTIVATION IN CREATING THIS PROJECT
I first watched Over the Garden Wall only just recently, but its fun and cartoonish art style and whimsical atmosphere made me feel like a kid again, so I wanted to mimic that feeling in my code. I was also drawn to the character design and wanted to see if I could recreate their shapes, pushing myself beyond the circles and rectangles I was comfortable with.
DESCRIBE YOUR PROCESS
One of the requirements for this project was to make use of arrays, and I thought it would be neat to try to apply them to music notes. Since I had recently watched Over the Garden Wall and there is a scene in it in which an ensemble of frogs plays instruments, I decided to attempt to recreate that. The background was fairly straightforward, but it became very difficult once I started trying to create the frogs themselves. In the end, I ended up using vectors and bezier curves to get the shapes I wanted, but it was extremely time consuming to plot every point and curve and took a lot of math, as well as trial and error. Getting them to move proved much easier than expected, as it also mostly came down to having the right math.
WHAT DOES THE PROJECT MEAN TO YOU?
Working on this project felt almost like a way of escaping from the world. The whole show is centered around this strange and whimsical world that the main characters find themselves in, and so I really enjoyed the process of working on the project. Now that it’s finished, I feel proud of my ability to not only code proficiently, but create something that brings me so much joy.
Below: A screenshot of my project
