Drinking coffee by the seaside (16th of October 2009)

Press play in the window above to start streaming from YouTube. A visualization of my music based on a true story. Early morning, perhaps 6 am, I guess year 1999? An island. Adriatic. July. We just woke up and stumble along the waterfront searching for coffee that we have trouble finding since all the cafes are closed. We search, already nervous, for the one that should open at 7 am, but it seems that none of the women cleaning and preparing the cafes for opening intends to open it soon. We finally find one where we can get coffee. We sit on the terrace. Only now we see how beautiful it is. The morning. Waves slowly and barely noticeably stretch along the shore. The sea wakes up lazily together with us. We drink coffee.

Concerning the technical details, I simulated the sea and the waves by the superposition of many (co)sine functions of type

where k_x and k_y are x and y components of the wave vector, |k| is its modulus, C is a dispersion constant (this means that C|k| is the wave frequency), and t is time - it is a simple acoustic plane wave in x-y plane (i.e. the image plane). The wave vectors were chosen randomly from a certain interval. The whole "simulation" contains about a hundred different plane waves. But that's not the end... The values of the superposition of waves were used to determine the rotation angle of the colorful dodecahedra, in fact, a kind of "3D pixels". Dodecahedron has 12 faces, and I painted each of them using one of the colors from the palette that represents the sea (see below):

In fact, these are textures and not simple colors as can be seen from the soft variation of colors that suggest waves, sand, and similar. As the wave "rolls", so the dodecahedra rotate, turning some of their faces toward the observer, depending on the value of the background wave. This is how it looks in one frame of the movie:

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Last updated on 16th of October 2009.