Oscillate
short film
Oscillate was my thesis for grad school at School of Visual Arts in the MFA Computer Arts program. The concept around the film came from my fascination with Fourier analysis, particularly in the context of sound, where any sound, no matter how complex sounding, can be decomposed as a series of simple sine and cosine waves added together. I wanted to tell this story of complexity emerging from the summation of simple elements. The music was composed by myself, done in tandem with the visuals.
The Process
Apart from the particle systems, everything in this film is animated through sine wave functions. I take a line of dots and derive their vertical position as a function of multiple sine waves added together. To get the circular shapes seen in the middle of the film, I derive the XYZ position based on differnt sine and cosies, akin to Lissajou patterns in math.
I derived the concept for this film through experienting tih Processing, the creative coding language. I was just playing with sine waves one day and found interesting patterns emerge when I started to cascade multiple waves on top of each with different offsets in phase, frequency…etc
The particle systems use your standard layers of noise to create organic shapes and patterns. Their velocity is derived from the motion of the wave strands, and they have other forces like drag to simulate the feeling of them passing through air. I also use fluid simulations in some other parts to make the particles feel more like fire or plasma.
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