To create a narrative you need to produce a story board to plan the scenes and dialogue.
| Rama and Sita | The Odyssey | The Minotaur |
You will need to find suitable backgrounds as photographs or drawings and import them into the Scratch Stage.
You will also need suitable figures to act as characters. You could use existing ones but these are unlikely to cover all your needs.
The examples below are taken from one of the projects included with Scratch, an aboriginal creation story .
The Scratch techniques you will require include:
This script is for the Stage. It shows that at the start the background 'title' is loaded, followed by costume1. At the end of this code the message 'start' is broadcast, which is picked up by a sprite:
This code shows a sprite responding to the 'start' message by doing whatever is required of the sprite at that point. The character hides and then responds to the 'start' message by changing its costume and showing itself.
The characters and backgrounds of the story interact by broadcasting messages and acting on the message in the ways that the story requires.
The programming technique being used here is a sequence: one instruction after another.
Other messages: fire, Biame, complaint, Biame's decision, find kookaburra, fight, mad eagle, wake up, drop egg, final day, end
These messages and their corresponding actions are scrambled in the program code and difficult to follow. Rather than unscramble them we will make our own story. You need to make a story board based closely on the story you have chosen.
Create a new folder for the project and save a Scratch program into it.
Find the backgrounds and any additional sprites you will need. List the backgrounds and the characters that you will need for each one.
Plan the story by the sequence of backgrounds.
Background 1: image; characters; actions; dialogue.
Background 2: etc.
Each scene must be planned down to the level of the position and movement of the characters and the precise timing of the speeches.