My IGME-480 Blog

 My project title for this assignment is "The Anatomy of Happiness". I took data from world happiness index records to then visualize it. The color scheme I chose for this was hues of pink and red to match the color schemes of actual anatomy diagrams of the inside of the human body. Additionally, I also felt it matches the positive themes of happiness, love, hope...things like that. I also chose and imported a font based on that, to soften the look of my program instead of just having a typical serif or sans serif font. Overall, what I wanted to depict here was the country and their rank at the top of the screen, the overall happiness score at the bottom, and then an abstract representation of three values in the main center area: GDP (aka how good the economy is), social support (aka how much the government and community supports you in daily life), and freedom (aka how little restraint their is on any actions you take). I did the painting part with noise, but am still strug...

In this project, I plan to use a dataset of countries' Happiness Index scores in 2024. I will specifically use the index score for that year, though there is other information as well for other years as well. The general mood I want to convey is hope, through pretty, blooming colors. Essentially what I want to show is a world map in colors, similar to something like this: For the interaction, it will be a slider interaction. The original map will be white. Then, as you slide the slider forward, the colors slowly bloom onto the screen. It will be shades of pink that darken into red. Here, I'm using pink/red to lean into love/happiness themes. For the overall mood and color, here is my moodboard: For the font, I found this Google Font I really like. I feel it fits the theme quite well: La Belle Aurore. I've already downloaded both the font and the dataset. So overall my project will be a blank world map which slowly has color bloom from pink to red, darker depending on the ha...

 For this exercise, the goal was incorporating the color blue in the controls. My personal goal was to use that to show two polar opposite moods depending on how you mess with the slider. The video I shot was of a plushie pulling lying in bed and pulling the covers up. The slider then controls the level of blue in the scene. In my project, my original idea was to take blue and associate it with sadness and melancholy. Therefore, two things could happen: either you added more blue or extracted the blue. However, when I actually started working, using "add" on the blue constant actually provided a very different mood as to what I was expecting, and I ended up liking it a lot more. Because of this, I decided to change my idea. After fully "adding" the blue, my video showed a bright, happy atmosphere instead of melancholy, but it fit surprisingly well. My piece made me think more of getting into bed after a long day and feeling that sadness and tiredness leave you and b...

For this exercise, my goal was to show a transition from a positive mood to a negative one. I took footage of myself writing that was meant to show optimism and diligence, hope for the future. Then, I took footage myself with flashing red lights to show despair and helplessness. I wanted to tell the story of how it feels to start off as a hardworking, happy student that eventually spirals into depression and the feeling of always being behind no matter how much you do.  For the first scene, I created it by pre-writing a bunch of words in a notebook and then filming it in a way that you can see me writing more words. At the end, to contribute to the positive atmosphere, I purposely put things like exclamation marks and a smiley. For the second scene, it was done in complete darkness. I did not show the environment at all, just myself with my head in my hands and a red light flashing on and off. I really wanted to use lighting in this particular scene to convey the negative feelings....