Animation Programs: Scenarios and Storyboards

1. Animation Programs: Scenarios and Storyboards Alice

2. Step 1: Design • Decide on the problem to be solved • Often the problem to be solved is given to you by your instructor, team leader, etc. • Other times, you get to make it up! • We will practice both • Design a solution • We will use a storyboard design • Break down a long scenario into sequences of many short scenarios. • For each (short) scenario, a story board is created to depict the sequence of scenes.

3. Step 1: Design • Design a solution • We will use a storyboard design technique, commonly used in the film industry

4. Example • The scenario is: Several snow-people are outdoors, on a snow-covered landscape. A snowman is trying to meet a snowwoman who is talking with a group of her friends (other snowwomen.) He says "Ahem" and blinks his eyes, trying to get her attention. • The problem is: How can we create this animation?

5. Create Initial World

6. None StoryboardOption 1: Sketches

7. StoryboardOption 2: Screen Shots Initial scene Snowman tries to catch snowwoman’s attention Snowwoman looks around

8. Storyboard Option 3: Text • Animation Artists sketch their storyboards • You may not have such expertise, so here is a textual form that can be used: This is like a "to-do" list. The Learning to Program in Alice textbook puts a textual storyboard in a box. Do the following actions in order snowman turns to face snowwoman snowman “blinks eyes” and calls out to the snowwoman. snowwoman turns around.

9. Creating An AnimationProgram Alice

10. Step 2: Implementation • Toimplement the storyboard, translate the actions in the storyboard to a program. • Program (a.k.a. script) • a list of instructions to have the objects perform certain actions in the animation

11. Writing the Program • Our planned storyboard (to-do list) is: • The idea now is to translate the design steps to program instructions. Do the following actions in order snowman turns to face snowwoman snowman “blinks eyes” and calls out to the snowwoman. snowwoman turns around.

12. Translating the Design • Some steps in the storyboard can be written as a singleinstruction • The snowman turns to face the snowwoman • Other steps are composite actions that require more than one instruction • The snowman tries to catch the snowwoman’s attention is two actions • The snowman says “ahem” • The snowman raises and lowers his eyes

13. Action Blocks in Alice Sequential Action Block Simultaneous Action Block

14. Demo • Ch02Snowpeople

15. Concepts in this first program • Program instructions may have arguments • Example: for the move instruction, the arguments we used in this example were • direction • distance • DoTogether and DoInOrder blocks can be nested one inside the other

16. Testing • An important step in creating a program is to run it – to be sure it does what you expect it to do. • We recommend that you use an incremental development process: • write a few lines of code and then run it • write a few more lines and run it • write a few more lines and run it… • This process allows you to find any problems and fix them as you go along.

17. Comments • While Alice instructions are easy to understand, a particular combination of the instructions may perform an action that is not immediately obvious. • Comments are used to document the code – explain the purpose of a particular segment of the program to the human reader.

18. Demo • Ch02SnowpeoplewithComments • Comments in this example world illustrate • description of the action performed by the entire method • description of the purpose of a small segment of code

19. Assignment • Read Chapter 2 • Go through the “first encounter” animation. • Read Tips & Techniques 2: Orientation and Movement Instructions. • Do either exercise 4 or exercise 5 on page 48; upload to your submission folder. • [optional] Do exercise 6.