Animate Text
Basic animation in Flash is quite simple, as you are about to find out. Here you will use a Timeline effect to animate the text you just created. Specifically, you will make the text spin and move in time. In Chapter 10, Timeline effects are explored in more detail.

1. On the Toolbar, click the Selection tool (the black arrow) and then click the text on the stage. Select Insert | Timeline Effects | Transform/Transition | Transform from the menu. The Transform dialog box appears, as shown in the following illustration. Here you can adjust several of the characteristics of an object in time, such as the scale, spin rotation, and transparency.

2. At the top of the dialog box, for Effect Duration, highlight the default number 30 and type in 60. This will make the transformations last through 60 frames. The frames represent different states of an object in time or in various stages. Frames are represented in the timeline as little rectangles. With this setting, the text will animate for about fi ve seconds.

3. In the Spin text input box, type 10. This will make the text spin ten times by the time the animation reaches the last frame. Note that the Rotate number changes to 3600 when you do this.

4. Underneath that, for Final Alpha, type in a 0. This will make the text fade out on the last frame.

5. For Motion Ease, type in 100. This will make the spinning slow down on the last frame. Click the Update Preview button in the upper-right corner of the dialog box to get a glimpse of what the animation looks like, as shown in the following illustration.

To see what your animation looks like on the stage, click the OK button on the bottom left of the dialog box. Then, from the menu, select Control | Test Movie. An SWF file is generated and you can see your animation come to life. The SWF format is the native Flash file format used for Flash movie distribution. To some extent, you can preview your animation on the stage, but testing the movie always gives you a more accurate representation of what the audience will see when the movie is published. As expected, the word “ANIMATION” spins around and fades out over a period of five seconds. You have created your first animation in Flash.

Some people think SWF stands for “Shockwave Flash File.” It actually means “Small Web Format,” a nomenclature perfect for Flash movies, since Flash player files tend to be smaller than animations generated from other applications.

If this were a real title, you obviously wouldn’t want it to keep running over and over as it is doing in this example. The reason it’s repeating itself is because the animation loops forever. To get it to stop when you want it to, you need to instruct the movie to stop when the animation reaches a certain point in the timeline. In the next section, you’ll learn how to add a Stop action to make the movie stop playing when it reaches the last frame.