I was a little at a loss as to what to do for this assignment. I came up with half an idea for something recombinant based on Jane Austen Unscripted, but I didn't have time to develop it. So I opted for lots of particles. Particles make everything better.
Lost is a show about mystery. Beneath the facade of a regular old plane crash on an island in the middle of nowhere, something weird is going on. The show's narrative arc is all about selective revelation, but because the story has been stretched out over so many years, it's hard to really keep track of them all (without help, at least). In my own experience, it has been a process of trying to keep track of the overall picture while not always being able to see the details - even those that were previously shown.
Also, it's got a smoke monster in it.
This program is not meant to be run in real-time. Computation time for the movement of the black cloud particles slows the whole thing down to one frame per second or less. Instead, the program uses the Movie library to save the output as a Quicktime file. Unless you're specifically interested in seeing the program in action, I'd recommend just looking at the video output. There's a low-resolution version on YouTube, here. (I'm having some inexplicable trouble with YouTube playing this video really slow, but the lossless version is too big to upload here. Suggestions?)
To see the code or run it yourself, download the zip package here. If you go into the code, you can set it to produce a 1024x768 version that takes super-long to render, if you want.