The song critiques the prevalence of fake friendships between famous figures, “where people may often pose as friends purely for the sake of sharing it online” (Genius).  While it was helpful that this song is short and repetitive (and that Waterparks is my favorite band), I chose this song as the foundation of my piece to nod at the friendships we make in college.  Over four years, I’ve noticed who I’ve stuck with, and I felt that this song mirrored the dynamics of my suitemates and me; we are truly friends, and our relationship is not transactional.

This piece uses a green custom font inspired by Awsten Knight’s handwriting and the FANDOM album cover.  Awsten is the band’s lead singer and drives most of their creative direction, often hand-writing comments, announcements, and song titles for the album packaging and social media posts. 

I considered two generative aspects: word movement and font family.  Originally, I wanted each member’s name to appear in a random font, with Awsten’s name particularly appearing in a weird, distorted font to match his voice in the song.  Ideally, each member would have an assigned font family, so their random font would be pulled from that pool.  However, it was tedious to download, convert, and link the fonts that I wanted to use, especially since I would need at least 3-4 fonts in each family to appear random.  That being said, when installing the custom font for Awsten’s handwriting, it’s important to use a TrueType to Adafruit GFX converter so the font in the header file can be properly referenced.

Ultimately, I decided to implement a random word movement animation, where the last line of text, “We’re all friends,” emerges from a random side of the screen each loop.  The pseudo-random direction reminded me of the band’s continuous experimentation, and Awsten’s motivation never to do the same thing.  Yet, they are always true to their values and vision for what “Waterparks” is to the fans, hence the pseudo-ness.