Week 4 – Displaying Text

Concept
As always I just kept on with the concept of doing my assignment related to Dexter. He is part of Miami Metro Homicide division. So, I thought maybe text displaying randomly through .csv file would be a nice integration. A bit delusional, but Dexter would make a report of his killings of other bad people in a Miami Metro Case Files. It would consist of Observation, Target, Method, Justification, and Disposal rows.

Highlight of the code

// Get Observation: Go to the first row (OBSERVATION_ROW), split it, and pick one random part.  

  let observationOptions = split(strings[OBSERVATION_ROW], ',');
  let observation = random(observationOptions);

  let targetOptions = split(strings[TARGET_ROW], ',');
  let target = random(targetOptions);

  let methodOptions = split(strings[METHOD_ROW], ',');
  let method = random(methodOptions);

  let justificationOptions = split(strings[JUSTIFICATION_ROW], ',');
  let justification = random(justificationOptions);

  let disposalOptions = split(strings[DISPOSAL_ROW], ',');
  let disposal = random(disposalOptions);

Assigning each row to values from 0 to 4, using preload() function and this part of the code is the main functionality of the sketch. The code above is essential in order to split and then randomly pick a word from each row in .csv. After, by calling text() function I can easily display the randomly picked words inside the draw() function. One of the things I learnt during the class and implement is noLoop() and inside the mouseClicked() function loop() so that only when clicking the words would shuffle.

Sketch

Reflection
I like that my works are very conceptual in a sense that they follow the same storyline and are logically connected. For example, this one – it is about Dexter Morgan’s life as a blood spatter analyst at Miami Metro PD, so he has to fill out some reports on case files. Randomizing his victims, his way of killing them, justifications is a funny way to learn new concept and at the same time be interested in the work I’m doing. In the future, even though maybe not very connected to this one, I would love to learn how to do something similar to wavy patterns of blood using sin or cos functions, representing the world of Dexter Morgan. I think such patterns could be like an intro animation to the Dexter TV series with beautiful red patterns over white background.