ABOUT

The concept of the work is to have a flock of birds fighting against the wind on a beach. This required a highly customisable environment that would allow control of wind speed, gust frequency and duration, change in wind direction as well as flocking for the birds and animation clip control.

I chose to use perlin noise for the wind as it was a performant solution that allowed me to customise its paramters in all 3 axes. The wind is then fed into the flocking algorithm (an implementation of boids) with some additional feilds for gravity, bird locomotion (Lift) and bounds. Each bird is generating it's own thrust within the simulation based on the state of its animation (when flapping it generates thrust, otherwise it glides back on the wind).

The result of this set up is a pleasing simulation that animated birds on a coastline. It was intended to look simpler than real life, while a little exagerted. The main conerns were to keep the birds moving as a group, with clear independence for each bird, all while staying within screen space. The film is installed as a piece of wall art and should feel the same at any given moment, while also being entirely dynamic and unrepeatable.