Our final project’s visual composition was inspired by the idea of planets and the vastness of the universe.

We began by creating a glitching effect through combining the layer, luma, and colorama functions. First, we generated a layer of flashing dots modulated by an oscillator, saved to the o1 layer. By applying the luma function, the dots drift across the visuals in o0, simulating falling stars. Adding colorama on top produced an unexpectedly stunning comet-like effect, which we stored as visual 6 in our array. Elora described it as comets falling on the dinosaurs, and children gazing into the bewildering depths of the universe, which became the thematic anchor of our performance.

Building on the universe theme, we introduced a rotating sphere shader as a planet. Drawing from a previous solo session and with the help of Claude AI, we developed two shader variants: one that rotates with dynamic shading, and another that remains a solid, stable sphere throughout. Yihan noted that blending oscillation and noise with the shader gave it the appearance of Mars with a more divergent color palette. These two shaders formed the visual foundation of our performance.

From a single planet, we expanded outward. By applying the repeat and blend functions, the sphere multiplied into planets of varying sizes. As the blending parameter increased, an unexpected grid and strip filter emerged, layering over the infinite planets. These three visuals — the falling stars, the rotating sphere, and the multiplying planets — formed the backbone of our performance. Our approach was to manipulate them gradually using MIDI values, building variation and tension while maintaining visual cohesion.

The main challenge we encountered during our final sync session was smoothing the transition between the falling star effect and the sphere visuals. After extended technical exploration, we discovered that layering the falling star effect over the rotating sphere created a natural bridge between the two.

Hearing Elora and Yihan’s music, the kids’ sample made me think back to when I was a kid and how I was obsessed with the moon and the crescent shape and how magically it changes throughout the month. I thought about the old mythology of the moon and all the mysterious in its shape, lumination. I thought of using a function to manipulate the shader’s X and Y axis and by changing the speed of the filling of the sphere maybe I could achieve that effect. To my surprise, the moon effect was also created, even though I still couldn’t explain the math behind it and was so surprised by the spontaneous visual change. We decided to add the moon in the end and let it vanish as the music vanishes beside the kid sample, and I also love this part.