In order to work towards a final goal for this assignment I was thinking of creating a simple creature that could be animated trough code.  At first I was thinking of creating a snake, a fish and even a frog. But these animals where not the thing I was looking for. Than I realized I should give jellyfish a try, I know these creatures can be really beautifull, and also the way they move is fascinating. So after some short search I stumbled upon a blogpost called Stunning Pictures of Jellyfishes over at Abduzeedo.com. And these pictures are stunning indeed!

Also there are a lot of nice videos showing the movement of jellyfish over at Vimeo, for example, check this one out:

After analyzing some video's I started with drawing some vector shapes in Illustrator for the body. Keeping in mind I wanted to animate this shape by moving its points. So next step was trying to move the points and handles so I would end up with a different shape that represented the end of the animation. After calculating and converting the coordinates I entered them into the code to create a basic shape animation.

Also I added the tentacles I created before, that would follow the jellyfish where ever  it goes. To make the animation more fluent I used some easing code that I found for Actionscript. After that I turned my attention to making the jellyfish move a bit more realistic by linking its velocity to the animation stage. This resulted in the program shown below:

You may download the source code or win32 executable if you like.