Breen - Creating digital animations ; animate stories with scratch

CREATING DIGITAL ANIMATIONS

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931714

ISBN: 978-1-119-23352-7 (pbk); 978-1-119-23355-8 (ebk); 978-1-119-23354-1 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I HAVE WANTED TO TELL MY OWN STORIES WITH ANIMATION. My first project was an animated birthday card for my grandfather. A boat sailed across the screen and then displayed Happy Birthday. He was blown away, perhaps because this happened over 30 years ago, before computer animation appeared on television or in films.

Today, digital animation is everywhere, but most people think that animating on their own is too hard. Think again! Scratch makes it easy for anybody to get started with animation.

Scratch was created for you. The designers at the MIT Media Lab had several goals:

• Give you powerful software for free
• Make it easy for you to learn
• Allow many different ways for you to use the software
• Enable you to browse, play, and remix other projects
• Enable you to share your projects
• Create an online community where you can learn from one another

Now review that list of six goals. Where does it say, Force parents or teachers or coaches or kids to buy a big, fat Scratch book? Nowhere! So why are you still reading? Dont you know you can go to scratch.mit.edu right now and start Scratching?!?

If you are completely new to Scratch, it might be a good idea to start with one of the built-in tutorials. To see them, click the question mark in the top-right corner.

In this book, you can start with any project. If you have not done much animating inside Scratch, you may find it useful to start with , where I share all kinds of tricks (and you discover that you don't have to be an awesome artist to create great-looking characters).

The Tip icon marks tips and shortcuts that you can use to make coding easier.

The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you from scratching your head a ton.

To use Scratch online visit section).

Technically, you can use the Scratch website without an account, but you will have to save projects to your computer and then upload them each time you visit the Scratch website to continue working on them. With an account, you can save files online and share projects with other Scratch users.

Go ahead and start Scratch! Turn on your computer, open a web browser, and visit section).

To run Scratch online, you need a relatively recent web browser (Chrome 35 or later, Firefox 31 or later, or Internet Explorer 8 or later) withAdobe Flash Player version 10.2 or later installed. Scratch 2 is designed to support screen sizes 1024 x 768 or larger.

You can install the Scratch 2 Offline Editor to work on projects without a Scratch user account. After Scratch 2 is installed, you will not need an Internet connection to work on projects. Thisversion will work on Mac, Windows, and some versions of Linux (32 bit). Visit