Assignment 7.1 - Creative Coding!

Technical note: Chrome and Scratch don't play nicely (at least they don't on my end - I need to investigate!) so you may want to open this in Safari if it's not playing. 

Part 1 

I found this digital short on Scratch, and think this is a pretty good example of an advanced use case. I  struggled a lot with figuring out how to do the basic stuff I made, but this demonstrates the range of possibilities that can be unlocked with experience in Scratch. The audio, in particular, was reminiscent of the "old school" animated cartoons of the 90s, because it was as much of the narrative as the script. I've always been interested in how audio can create mood in a scene, so it was inspiring to see this done in a relatively accessible format. 

Part 2 

 

This is a brief animated version of the rooftop scene of Tommy Wiseau's The Room, with bears playing Johnny and Mark.

I'm sure this breaks one or two copyright laws, so forgive me. My friends and I have been quoting The Room at each other recently, so this idea occurred to me after playing around with Scratch for a few days and getting attached to the bear Sprite. The jerky, awkward diction (and framing... and plot...) of The Room lends itself to parody in this format.  For example, I broke up the first line "I did not hit her..." and then added a module to "wait 2 seconds" and then say "I did noooot." That said, the timing was fairly hard to manage, and took a lot of tinkering to figure out and stay true to the cadence of the script. For instance, I wanted Mark to show up a few seconds Tommy said "Oh hi Mark." I wanted to reference the water bottle as well, as it couldn't be "thrown" like in the scene, but I wanted to heighten the inherent humor of the medium by having it glide to the ground. 

This animation is not a smooth ride, but neither is The Room. 

Also, just for fun, this was my first stab at creating an animation on Scratch. It's silly.