Animation Programs: Scenarios and Storyboards

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Animation Programs Scenarios and Storyboards

• Alice

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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.

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Step 1 Design

• Design a solution
• We will use a storyboard design technique,
  commonly used in the film industry

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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?

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Create Initial World
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StoryboardOption 1 Sketches
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StoryboardOption 2 Screen Shots
Initial scene
Snowman tries to catch snowwomans attention
Snowwoman looks around
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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.
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Creating An AnimationProgram

• Alice

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Step 2 Implementation

• To implement 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

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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.
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Translating the Design

• Some steps in the storyboard can be written as a
  single instruction
• The snowman turns to face the snowwoman
• Other steps are composite actions that require
  more than one instruction
• The snowman tries to catch the snowwomans
  attention is two actions
• The snowman says ahem
• The snowman raises and lowers his eyes

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Action Blocks in Alice

Sequential Action Block
Simultaneous Action Block
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Demo

• Ch02Snowpeople

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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

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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.
  

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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.

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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

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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.