Embedded Files
S’more than a Square
Carli McGinty, 8th Grade
Drakes Creek Middle School
GIF
I started by adding a jumping square with eyes, exploding. I thought of the idea of squishing the square to turn it into s’mores.
For the square and its physical features, I used shapes that were available in the Scratch costume creator. I used the line tool, square tool, and oval / circle tool. I did the same for the hands and the s’mores. For the explosion, I used the drawing tool to create the shape, and colored the inside red, orange and yellow.
I used both Scratch and Ezgif to create the GIF. Scratch was used to create the images, while Ezgif was used to make the animation / video into a GIF format file.
First, I needed to create all the images for the GIF. For this, I used Scratch’s costume designer tools. This included the line tool, square tool, the oval / circle tool, and the freehand tool. For the square, I used the square tool, filled it in white, and made a black border. For its hands and legs, I used the line tool to create different angled lines. For the square’s eyes, I created an oval and added a black circle inside of it. I copied this shape to create two eyes. For the explosion, I used the freehand tool to create an explosion-like shape. I then increased the brushes thickness, changed the colors, and colored the inside of the explosion. The hands were a colored circle and a rectangle grouped together. Lastly, for the s’mores, I used colored rectangles with a black border, stacked them, and resized them.
Then, I needed to make the images appear as if they were moving (like stop-motion). For the square jumping & falling, I moved the different shapes up/down, as well as stretched them as needed. For the explosion appearing and disappearing, I took the explosion shape, and stretched it as the explosion happened. For the hands moving up and down, I dragged them a little bit, copied the frame, moved it, copied the frame, and so on.
Next, I needed to create the code on Scratch to make the images automatically switch. The code is as follows (on the “animation” sprite): When green flag clicked, switch costume to (costume1), forever: [next costume, wait (0.02) seconds.] Meanings: The “switch costume to (costume1)” means that the animation will switch to frame one. The “forever” block / loop means that the code inside of it will repeat forever. The “next costume” block means that the animation will move to the next frame. Lastly, the “wait (0.02) seconds” block means that before the next frame is shown, 0.02 seconds will pass by.
Finally, I needed to convert the animation to a GIF. To do this, I started by recording the animation. I then went to Ezgif.com and hit “Video to GIF”. After that, I uploaded the screen recording of the animation and cropped it to make a perfect loop. Last, I downloaded the GIF to my computer.
I created this project because I love creating small animations like GIFs, and this idea of turning a square into s’mores was funny & cute.
The goal of my GIF is to get the audience in a better mood, and laughing. It’s pretty “sweet”.
The feature of my GIF that I am most proud of is the hands smashing the square into s’mores. I really like the transition that happens behind the hands of the square turning into s’mores.
A problem I faced was the speed of the animation. For stop-motion projects on Scratch, I usually set the speed to 0.6 seconds. However, in this case, that speed was too slow. I tested faster speeds, starting with 0.5 seconds. Obviously, that was too slow, so I skipped to 0.1 seconds, which was still too slow. Then I tried 0.05 seconds, still too slow. Finally, I tried 0.02 seconds, which was the “sweet” spot, the perfect speed.
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