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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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At some point in your career as a Flash developer, you’ll be asked this question: Can you make the text move a little? Animating text is as old as the hills for many Flash developers. With that said, it’s something you get asked to do a lot. This guide update is focused on showing you the fastest, easiest techniques and best third-party tools for animating the humble text block.

The Basics of Text Animation

Are you busting at the seams to create text effects? If you are, then you’ll want to skip this section of the guide and jump down to the next section. Why? Well, in this section I’m going to step through the actual process of creating text-based animation sequences by hand. It’s slow work, but very precise.

The first step is to create a text object. In this example, I added "test" text to the stage:

Figure Inline 1

It’s nothing special, but it will work for our purposes.

The next thing we’ll need to do is break the text apart so that we can animate each character separately. A quick way to do this is to right click on the text and choose Break Apart. This splits the text into individual objects.

Figure 1

It will be easier to animate each character if it’s on its own layer. The Distribute to Layers action will move each separate character to its own layer. The layer will be named automatically after the text block distributed to it.

Figure 2

With each character in its own layer, you can now add Motion Tween animation effects to each. In this example, the text is expanding and collapsing. I’m going to show you what I’ve done for one layer, but the rest of the layers should be treated similarly.

I’ve selected the "t" in "test." If we look at the Timeline, you’ll see that the "t" layer has three keyframes located at frame 1, 5, and 10.

Figure 3

Both frame 1 and 10 have the "t" in the same position. For frame 5, I moved the "t" 30 pixels. I used "Motion Tween" to animate the character from frame 1 to 5 and from frame 5 to 10. I turned on the onion skinning mode so you can see the animation sequence.

Figure 4

To animate all of the text, I repeated this same type of animation but I changed the distance that each text character moves to give the illusion of the text expanding and contracting. With onion skinning turned on, this is how the whole thing looks:

Figure 5

It looks a lot better when it’s animated.

As you can see, frame-based animation with text can be very time consuming. Fortunately, there are some tools that can help you.

Let Flash Do the Work

As you can see, creating your own text animation frame-by-frame is a real pain in the %"!. Well, at any rate, it’s not easy. So, why not take the easy way out and let Flash do the work for you?

Flash’s Timeline Effects, which are both fun and easy-to-use, allow you to quickly add complex animation sequences to movie clips and text objects on the stage.

I’ll demonstrate by showing you how to create an exploding string of text. First, you’ll need to add a string of text to the Stage. Just use a Static Text string. Here, I’ve added the words, "Hello, mum"

Figure 6

Right click on the text string and a menu should appear. Choose Timeline Effects > Effects > Explode.

Figure 7

A new window will open showing your text exploding with the default settings:

Figure 8

As you can see, there are lots of settings you can change including duration of the effect in frames, direction of effects, number of pixels in Arc size, Alpha levels, and more.

Select OK. Your screen will flash as the animation effect is added. When this is complete, you can test the effect and you’ll see that you can animate your text string. The new animation is created as a new Movie Clip, which you can move around in your movie.

Third-Party Tools You Can Use

As you can see, creating your own animation frame-by-frame is time consuming. And, while the Timeline effects are good, you’re still limited to a small collection of animations. When I need to create an animation effect with text, I almost always use a third-party tool. The reason for this is simple: the third-party tool is normally very cheap (or free with some tools) with a great range of animation effects and a much faster result.

The best place to go to find a collection of the latest Text Animation tools is at SWF Tools. This site is updated frequently so check it often if you’re serious about animating text.

When you’re shopping around for a third-party text animation tool, keep in mind that there are two main types of text effect: the News Ticker scrolling effect...and all others.

For the scrolling News Ticker there are two clear leaders: Amara and Scriptocean. Both companies provide tools with lots of customization. Below is Scriptocean’s Flash Text Scroller Wizard:

Figure 9

You can view Scriptocean’s Flash Text Scroller at http://www.scriptocean.com/flashscroll/index.html and Amara’s Flash News Ticker at http://www.amarasoftware.com/flash-news-ticker.htm.

Now, for the really fun third-party tools. My favorite text animation tool, which I’ve been using for years, is Wildform’s Wild FX. The current version has over 400 text effects! All you have to do is add the string of text, select the font specifications, and choose an effect. Wild FX then produces a SWF file that you can load through ActionScript or import into Flash. Easy as pie. Here is a screen shot of the online tool that lists many of the effects.

Figure 10

Another tool that I like is Anim-FX. Anim-FX is broader in scope than Wild FX. In addition to cool animation effects, you can also create stunning advertising banners, which is great for designers just getting into Flash advertising. Here’s a screen shot of one of Anim-FX’s effects:

Figure 11

If you don’t have the money for the animation tools listed above, don’t fret. There are free tools out there. One of my favorites is Flash Kit’s online FLASHTyper. The tool is free and has a load of animation effects you can add. Here’s one that I picked at random:

Figure 12

The only caveat with FLASHTyper is that the service is sometimes down due to upgrades.

Summary

Whether you like it or not, at some point you’re going to have to create text animations in Flash. That’s just the reality of the situation. And, if you use the effect wisely, your boss or customer will likely ask you to add more text effects to your projects.

For many people, text animation is the first step into animation. In later sections of the guide, you’ll see how you can take the fundamentals learned here and apply them to full motion animation.

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