Adventures in Animation Alice – Advanced! Michelle Venable-Foster June 2006

Alice – Advanced!

Michelle Venable-Foster

June 2006

Background Music!• If you’d like to have a soundtrack play for the duration of your

animation, you will have to create new event, and select When the world starts.

• You can attach the method to any object that is in your world. Even the ground can play your background music!

• Finally, import the .wav or .mp3 file you’d like to play!

Create Your Own Methods!

• You can create a new method from a series of the existing methods for your objects!

• Click on the object you want to create a method for, and select create new method.

Create Your Own Methods!• Give your new method a name. Make this

name meaningful and use the “intercap” technique. The intercap technique means that you use a lowercase letter for the first letter of the name, and an uppercase letter for the first letter of each additional word in the name.– Examples: playSound, jumpForJoy, eatFood

Create Your Own Methods!• Your new method should now be out onto

the Editor area, ready to be created.

• Drag the other methods that will comprise this new method out onto the Editor area.

Customize Your Objects!• All of the objects in Alice have properties

that can be changed.

• For example, I can change my cow’s color to red!

Add 3-D Text

• You can add a title for your animation by using the 3-D text object.

• Add an object to your world, and scroll to Create 3-D Text in the local gallery.

Add 3-D Text• Type in your text; choose your font and size.• Once the text is on the screen, you can use the

Properties tab to change the color of the text.• You can also use the tools to position your text in your

movie.

Making Your 3-D Text Disappear

• You will probably want to use the text as a title screen, so you’ll want to fade the title out after an amount of time.

• There are two ways you can do this – by changing the isShowing property or by changing the opacity property.

Title Screen This movie shows how you can fade out a title. Experiment with this method

and by changing the isShowing property. Click on the screenshot to play the movie.

If/Else• An if/else statement is also called a conditional

statement.• An example of a conditional statement in real life

would be – – “If it is sunny on Saturday, we can go to the beach,

otherwise we can go to the movies.”

If – it is sunny on Saturday we can go to the beachElse – we can go to the movies.

If/Else

You will get a short menu asking you if you want a true or false condition. Choose true.

Experiment with this code for the next few minutes. Ask your neighbor or the instructor if you need help. You will have to think for this part!

Loop• You can have a block of code repeat for a

certain number of times.

• You can choose one of the numbers in the drop-down menu, or determine your own by selecting other.

While• You can also use the while command to

have code repeat for a certain amount of times.

• You will have to create a new variable.

Creating A New Variable

• Give your variable a name and choose a Type.

• I have named my variable count and given it the type number and its value is 5.

While

• In this example, I want the code to repeat while count is less than 5.

• This means that the code will repeat 5 times, since I will start my count at 0.

While

• You have to give your variable an initial (beginning) value.

While

• You will have to add 1 to your variable. This is called incrementing.

• Drag the count variable tile from the top of the method and drop a copy in the While tile after the other instructions. When you do this, a short menu will appear asking you how you want to set the value of count.

• Choose set value, choose expressions, and then click count.

• Now the tile says count set value to count. You need to build a math expression so that the tile will say count set value to count + 1.

Incrementing The Variable

• Click the second word count, and select math from the menu that appears.

• Then select count + and then 1.• Now, world.my first method should match the specifications as

shown below.

Let’s Test The Movie!• If I have coded correctly, my cow should make a popping sound 5 times. Click on

the picture to play the movie.

And The Emmy Goes To…!

• Now, it’s time for you to pull out all the stops!

• For the rest of “Alice Time”, you are to create a cinematic masterpiece!

• Remember to be creative and spell your words correctly!