It's been over a year since I posted to this blog. I decided I should add the new version of my ePoem, Destructive Elements.

I changed it to have music and to improve the timing better. The new version uses 'broadcast' to control the timing as it cycles through each of the elements. I added Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Winter 1 for the music.

OK! DONE!  My first Scratch project is online at the Scratch website!  I noticed that the timing is different online at the Scratch website than when I run it local on my computer.

OH WELL .. I learned a lot doing this first project and I will learn more in the future.

Finished the final phrase, "twisters rip" this afternoon.

I also noticed that if you click on the gray background where the code is displayed, you have the option to clean up the code, and make an image of the code --this is handy for using the code on other sprites.

Sometimes I have to remember KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

The "landslides bury" animation is very simple.  But it works for me!  It took nearly no time at all to create.  I'm really getting the hang of Scratch!

I want the animations to play one at a time, so I need them to wait until it's their turn to display.  It is easier to created the animations as separate Scratch projects, then import them into the final one.  That way, I don't have to watch the whole animation to work on each phrase.  After importing them into a single Scratch project, I set 'waits' and 'hides' so that they display and run in the right order. 

Scratch is very logical and there good 'Help' on every command.  Just right click on a command to see it!

Read the commands to learn the options.

Creating the simple "flames char" animation inspired me to read all the code options in the various sections in Scratch.  That gave me some other ideas for animations as well as some ideas for optimizing and changing my flames animation. That was fun!

Next I animated "floods drown" and decided to make the letters in 'drown' float as the letters in the word "floods" touched them.  I did it by creating a separate sprite for each letter and then using the wait command to animate the letters one by one. The animation is simply setting its position up right, then rotating a little to the left & right.

Fire, fire, everywhere.

For some reason the word "fire" seemed to want me to animate it, I decided to look for a haiku about the 4 elements.  I chose this one: Earth, Fire, Water, Air, by Firenze  The text is so simple, but immediately gave me ideas for animation:
Earth, Fire, Water and Air
Floods drown, landslides bury, flames char, twisters rip - destructive elements.

I animated "flames char" first. That got me used to programming with Scratch.  It also made me realize that I could choose fonts that help illustrate the idea.

My tech poems are too hard for me to animate...

Ok -- I changed my mind about the poem.  I couldn't think of any animations for the tech poems I made.  Sam and I decided it would save people time if they used existing poems, rather than write their own poems.  If someone wants to write a poem that's fine, but using a song lyric section, or section of an existing poem is fine too.

Since this would be my first Scratch project, I decided the simpler the better.  I decided to use a haiku, thinking that would be fewer words to animate and maybe easier imagery too.