How I Created Demo Videos with Scratch and iMovie
and it’s both fun and painful.
Background
I’ve been a software engineer for all my 10+ years of career. And now, I’m also a founder (Woohoo~). Among many other labels I can put on myself, I probably most deeply care about these two: “Mom” and “Builder”. So my new “baby’ is created at the intersection of education and technology: Curioasis, to help children play, learn, and stay connected with their friends during the COVID-19 lockdown, and anytime really. If you also have active and extrovert children stuck at home for who knows how many months, you should try it for your kids!
Enough promotion.
In this blog, I’m going to talk about how I created demo videos for Curioasis with animation using Scratch and iMove, like this one:
Scratch, the GUI programming language… for kids?
You read it right. Scratch is created for kids to learn programming. But it can be much more than that if used wisely. Anyone can use Scratch to create games, animations, music, and stories. Why? It’s deadly easy to learn and get started because it’s designed for kids!
What I want to create is an animation video with two types of content:
(1) A group video chat mockup with animated talking heads.
(2) Illustration of various games and activities in action.
Animated characters
Scratch provides many character assets out of box and each of them includes multiple “costume” variations, e.g. body movement, facial expression, outfit, etc.
Select a character, say “Abby”, create a loop of “Next costume” plus “wait 0.5 seconds”, I get an animated character in 30 seconds:
You can customize the character in every possible way: changing colors, manipulating shapes, editing arbitrary points on every line…
Look I just added a hat for Abby:
In the end I got a collage of four talking characters who look like happily engaged in a group video chat:
How to convert Scratch animation to video? It’s a little inconvenient that Scratch doesn’t provide a way to export as video. I simply recorded the screen using MacOS builtin screen capturer.
Animated game illustrations
I made a conscious decision to use illustration instead of screen recording to demonstrate some of the games on Curioasis.
Why would an illustration better than the real thing? The soul of all the activities on Curioasis is “social”. So I’d need someone else to join me to demonstrate the collaborative part. And coordinating screen recording on multiple computers and putting them together into one video will be a pain. And with animation, it’s much easier to control the tempo and have frame level control accuracy.
For example, I’d like to animate a Tic Tac Toe game.
I created a new “Sprite”, used free drawing to create one “Costume” for each game state, and again built the animation with delayed looping of “Next costume” action:
The free drawing brings a playful and casual style that goes well with the group video chat animations.
Turn raw footprints to a composed demo in iMovie
Using Scratch and screen recording, I got all the ingredients for the demo. Now it’s time for the less fun part…
First of all, it took me ages to create a layout of multiple videos like this in iMovie:
Why was it difficult?
(1) I can only create one video overlay layer in a project, which means to overlay multiple videos, I have to add one layer a time, export to file, import the file, overlay another, and repeat.
(2) iMovie only allows me to crop/resize the clips in a particular aspect ratio. I tried to find the project setting to change that, but it doesn’t exist for my version. So thinking about creating the vertical avatar strip first? Nope, cannot do that.
(3) iMovie does have a “split screen” mode for video overlay, but that’s a trap! It doesn’t allow you to change the size of each side and you are stuck with 1:1 split. What eventually worked for me is “picture in picture”, where you can resize and position the top clip more freely.
All in all, these are the awkward steps I took to create the above layout from 5 clips:
(1) Add a solid background first.
(2) Overlay avatar clip 1 onto the top right corner of the background using “picture in picture” mode. Export to file and import to main layer.
(3) Repeat step (2) for avatar clip 2 to 4, each positioned below the previous one. Export to file and import to main layer.
(4) Again using “picture in picture”, overlay the game illustration clip to fill the left part of the frame.
(5) Copy and paste the base layer (i.e. vertical video avatars on solid background) along the timeline, and add other game illustrations as overlay to complete the full demo.
Tip:
Set “picture in picture” transition time to “0”, or intermediate frames will have the solid background visible and it won’t look right.
Finally add transitions and titles between scenes and add music, which are all pretty straightforward and painless.
This is my first time of creating a relatively advanced video layout with iMovie. I won’t be surprised if I did something totally insensible. If you know a better way to achieve the same results, please surely let me know!
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Happy Sunday!
