Ch-ch-ch-changes

A lot changed during the creation process, due to time constraints and inspiration on-the-fly:

• The faces do not change to reflect different expressions. This was mostly because I ran out of time to gather enough photographs, but also because a few early experiments showed that getting expressions to translate in profile view was nearly impossible.

• I had a lot more difficulty with the movement of the characters and triggering of reactions than I thought I would. Presently it still needs work, and characters do not move off screen until triggered by the user to do so. However, the user can bring on multiple characters at will and send others off screen.

• The database of faces was narrowed to 5, and instead of 3 lists of 100 phrases, I generated a single list of 150 phrases used for both the right and left characters.

• The most massive change was the aesthetic. Because I wanted to have the conversations reflect thoughts about life, death, and existence in general, the sillier cartoon version presented in my proposal fell by the wayside. In creating the background image I hit upon a rather dark, catacomb-esque look that I like a lot, and so when I subsequently created the bodies of the characters I went for a monkish appearance.

  

• Something discussed during the proposal was the idea of using animated gifs so that characters would appear to "walk" onto the screen. However, I was unable to get gifs working in Processing, and that idea was abandoned.

• I was always going to have music in the background, and with the monastery theme in place it wasn't hard to track down something suitably chant-like. Like so many of my projects I pulled from Kevin MacLeod's website incompetech.com, which provides excellent quality royalty-free music.

• The piece developed a title as well. I decided to name it "Murmurs In The Corridor," to reflect the visual setting. It's worth noting that the characters pass horizontally across the screen, while the background image suggests a tunnel or chamber extending away through the z-axis. That the characters never approach the mysterious red door in the distance is representative of the grasping nature of philosophical discussions. It is an unanswerable question, yet there is the feeling that eventually, in time, someone must proceed down that ancient passage and try the handle.

• One last item to mention, the faces... I would eventually like to replace all of the heads with original, stylized versions. The reason is that as I worked on writing the 150 phrases for them to speak, I found myself concerned that real people would be matched up with them--people who have their own ideas and beliefs that probably different vastly from what I wrote (and some of what I wrote are ideas that even I don't profess to believe, but were included because I wanted to dialogue to span a wide range of views).