Animating Text by Blocks Objective.

Creating an animation on a text separating it in blocks of letters whose movement will be treated independently, adding to the text a showy effect that could be used as a presentation of entrance to a Web or another movie type. Exercise step by step. Lets base on the example that we have seen, to make our objective clear. Then we will be able to extrapolate it to any other text. Lets see how to obtain these effects by joining the techniques seen till now. 1 We write the text, in our case "aulaClic". 2 We open the Properties Panel (after selecting the text) and select the font. 3 We select the text just written. 4 We access to the menu Modify Break Apart . With this in hand we separate each letter, if not, Flash would treat all the text as a block and we couldn't give the effect to the letters. Separate the text in the following blocks: "a", "u", "la" and "Clic". We could change it if we want to apply another concrete effect. 5 Select these blocks and convert them into symbols, giving them an identification name and a Graphic Behavior, since we'll not animate them "internally". 6 Create 5 new layers, one for each created block. This last one is necessary since otherwise Flash would apply the movement to everything found in this layer and convert automatically everything to symbol, as we've commented previously. 7 We name each of the layers according to the text block that will be contained, but in inverse order in which the animation be created. The top layer will be called "Clic", the following "la" and so on successively. 8 We right click on the only frame which we have in the timeline and the emergent menu, then select Copy Frames. Next we'll paste the frames (right button -> Paste Frames) in all the layers. 9 We select each layer and we are going to erase the parts of the text that dont correspond to the part of the text that must contain. It is recommendable to block the rest of layers to assure that we erase the letters of that layer (it is necessary to take into account that in the beginning all the layers contain the same and overlaped objects).

10 Move the frame of each layer to the following frames: "A" : Frame 1. "U" : Frame 6. "LA" : Frame 12. "Clic" : Frame 18. 11 Select a frame five positions far from the last frame and press F6 each time. In the layer "Clic" select the frame 30 and press also F6. 12 We right click in the central frames that are among keyframes and select each time Create Motion Tween. 13 Extend the image of the last frames for each layer until they reaches the frame 30 (Right Button -> Insert Keyframe). 14 Except in the layer "Clic", select the first frame of each interpolation and increase the size of the block that contains 15 Select the first frame of the Clic layer and move out of stage the block "Clic". 16 In this layer, right click the frame 24 and select Insert Keyframe. 17 In this created frame we reduce the width of text block and stick it near the last "a".