Hypercompendia

Without even thinking twice, I automatically set up for "Animation" and story in a project playing with this software.  There are games, interactive pieces, music and stories suggested and some examples of each included with the free download.  This helps tremendously because if there is an action or sequence that you’d like to mimic, the projects are set up in the same format as the program so that you can see the scripts to see how they are set up to work.

My method was to leap ahead and take several steps back before I got a plan in mind.  I started out with the kitty character provided–which looks to be the posterboy for the Scratch program–and messed around a bit with the script to see what I could make him accomplish.  It was easy enough to make him move, change size and color and direction, add some noise and music, and give him a buddy.  Right there I got sidetracked by the desire to be completely original and so drew him a rabbit buddy in a Paint-like screen, although you can import images from other sources, and in fact, I did import one f my own photos for a background and considered playing with one of my drawings (Edgar? Jesus? Any one of my numerous penciled ladies?) as a character. 

Eventually, after I had played with the rabbit a bit and made some interesting stuff happen, a story came together and decided to book kitty out and drew another character that would suit the simple story line, and also imported a new photo image of my garden that seemed perfect for the setting.

I am now in the process of making the two characters interact, each character having three or four "costumes" or different stance so that a cartoonish motion effect can be accomplished by quick-switching between costumes.

With any luck, I may finish up something tonight to post with a link to the Scratch site to show the finished product.  There is a way of embedding the video into the weblog, but it seems  much simpler and more likely to work if it’s just downloaded to their site.