My project, A Night in The Warehouse for Art From Code is a visualizer for a song I made. I love making visualizers for the music I make so I took this project as an opportunity to combine what I’ve learned in class with my music. The visualizer tells a story of ghosts in a rave which are spotted when they collide with the ravers. Everybody’s too occupied with dancing to the music to care though. I wanted to represent the feeling of listening to music while walking around late at night. I also wanted to represent the colorful, cute, and creepy sound of the song.
I was heavily inspired by youtube channels like monstercat and NCS while making this which is why I added the connection between the audio and the array of dancing circles in the background. I chose the specific song because it felt like it conveyed a lot of different emotions. I had also played it previously at a rave and I wanted to show what it was like hearing it in that setting. The song reminds me of the soundtrack to games like “One Shot” and” A Night in The Woods”, so I tried to create a story similar to those games. Osamu Sato was a big inspiration for me while making this project because of his use of diverse colors and his style of simple shapes creating a complex picture.
The visualizer went through many different stages. My first goal was to create a scene in which the ravers’ size and color were randomly generated. I then went on to code the background in two layers. The first layer is an array of rounded rectangles which change to a random color on beat with the song. The second layer is an array of circles whose size is connected to the volume of the song through amplitude. This creates a dancing effect. Trying to make my project more dynamic and to give it a story, I added a second class of faces who would be the ghosts in the rave. When the ghosts collide with the ravers they become opaque and are “seen” by the ravers, hence the expressions of fright and awe. I then added the stars for visual effect and gave the ravers some life by coding a bobbing effect.
This project means a lot to me because of my past with coding. I used to learn code in elementary school through Khan Academy and summer camps but lost interest in it because I felt limited. Taking Art From Code has reignited my interest in coding and has made me feel more confident in my abilities. If I saw this project in elementary school I would have been proud of my future self.
