Ray of Light Revisited
upuaut8 aka David HIt is
important to take a moment to visualize any effect before
you try to work on it.
| 1a) |
Start out with a blank
stage. Choose menu option Modify/Movie to bring
up the property sheet for the movie. Set it to 350 by
75, and give it a black background. A frame rate of 24
fps is fine. I've ended up making this movie longer than
the tutorials that I've seen, but I like my movement a
little slower. |
| 1b) |
Save your work
Ctrl+S, or Ctrl+Shift+S, or menu option
File/Save. Choose a name which is descriptive, and
try to come up with numbering right away. You're going
to save this project dozens of times, and you should see
the file names in steps. This save I'm going to use
lostSoulROL1a. When I save it again, I'll save it as
lostSoulROL1b and so on. It's good to get into
this habit so that you can back track if necessary. |
Ctrl+S means
that you hold down your Ctrl key (apple key on the Mac) and
press the "s". This is used to save your file as the last
name you just gave it, in the last directory you just saved
it. It's a quick save and good enough for most things.
Ctrl+Shift+S,
means that you hold down both the Ctrl (apple key on the
Mac) and the shift key, and then press the "s". Sometimes
you'll want to use this save. This is a "save as" menu
option which lets you give it a new name.
Keep in mind that each time you save it as
a new name, it's saving the whole FLA file. Sometimes that
can get really large. If you are going to seriously get into
flash, I would consider either a CD ROM burner for your
files, and at the very least, a nice new 40 gig hard drive.
Creating the text, and aligning it to
center
| 2a) |
With your text tool,
start a line of text. Choose a font you like. Size
should be size 12, with a spacing of 2. Click on the
color swatch, and choose any color, from the palette
which pops up. I suggest White, but any highly visible
color will do. |
| 2b) |
Once you've typed out
your text, select the black arrow tool from your tool
panel. The text should change on the stage. A blue
square should appear surrounding it. This square is
called a "bounding box" and it represents the outer most
edge of a Flash object., |
I HIGHLY suggest that you use
something small, as few letters as possible, that is. The
"Crimson Matrix" logo I made took FOREVER and a day. Try
it small, because once you know how to do it, it'll be
much easier going through the process. We are using "Lost
Soul" as our example text. If I give you a reason why I'm
using that, I'll only inundate myself with tons of E-mail,
so I wont.
Also, be careful of what font you
use. Something with a lot of flanges is not going to look
as good as a sharp Arial.
| 2c)
|
Open your align panel, if
it is not already open, by choosing menu option,
Window/Panels/Align. Select the toggle To Stage
to the on position. Click on the top row of
icons, the second and the fifth icon. This will align
the group, according to it's bounding box, to the center
of the stage. |
| 2d)
|
Save your work
Ctrl+S, or Ctrl+Shift+S |
[ Embed
the whole animation inside a Movie Clip early, save time
later ]
| 3a) |
After the text is in
place and centered. Use the keys Ctrl+B or menu
option Modify/Break apart to break apart the
text. Each letter has now become a section of fill.
You cannot edit the text after this point in time.
|
| 3b) |
On the timeline, move the
mouse cursor over frame 1 of layer 1. It looks like a
gray square with a black dot in the center. The cursor
changes to a hand, click on this frame until the hand
closes. The frame should now be highlighted in dark gray
even if you remove your cursor. You may not be able to
see it, but the text is all selected as well as anything
else that is in the frame. In this case it's just the
letters we created. |
| 3c) |
Hit F8 or menu
option, Insert/Covert to Symbol. A Symbol
dialogue box will open. Select Movie Clip, and type in
the name that you would like the entire project to be
known. We are going to name this one, "lostSoulROL". |
This is something that is not really
covered in the tutorials. It's important to build things
inside of movie clips from the beginning. Copying frame
from the main timeline to a movie clip timeline first may
take extra time now but it's often necessary saving time
later on. The 1.0 version of this tutorial was written
verbatim from the book. When I finished the project I
realized that my animation stretched off the stage. I had
to move it. You can't really move these element after they
are in place. However, if you encapsulate the entire
project in a movie clip, you can simply use that movie
clip over and over again in animation's, positioning it
exactly as you wish. It is for this reason that I've
deviated from the tutorial in the book.
| 3d) |
It's important at this
point to check this object. Do not skip this step. Open
your Instance panel by using menu option
Window/Panel/Instance. Using the black arrow tool,
select the letters on the stage. If it has a blue
bounding box around it, it's already selected. In the
instance panel you should see information about the
object. It has the Movie Clip symbol, bright blue and
obvious, it has a behavior set to Movie Clip, and the
name you assigned it. There is also a place here for an
"instance name" should you need it in the future. You
can leave it blank for the moment. If you see these
things you know it's a movie clip and you can continue. |
| 3e) |
Save your work
Ctrl+S, or Ctrl+Shift+S |
|
