Scratch For Kids For Dummies

CHAPTER 9

Sounds Good to Me

If you are anything like my niece and nephew, half the time you are supposedly “watching” television, your eyes are not even on the screen. You’re texting somebody with your phone or looking up something on your tablet or playing a game on your laptop or even doing homework. One of the easiest ways to catch your attention, though, is to hit the Mute button on the remote, right? “Hey, I was watching that!” This should illustrate how important sound is to conveying a story.

That’s What He Said

In previous chapters, you began thinking about your story, designed some characters, and created an interior and an exterior scene. The next step in the animation process is to add dialogue.

Dialogue is so important to the animation process that actors are recorded before almost any animation begins because synchronizing character animation to sound is easier than trying to fit sound into finished animation. In the animation world, this initial sound recording is the scratch track. How perfect is that?

Although this chapter is about recording and playing audio, there is another way to have your characters speak to one another in Scratch. In Chapter 6, I introduce the SAY block. If you add this block to a character, any text you type into the block will appear ...