Before
we start
Have you ever watched a flash animation
and thought to yourself "It looks good but would
look better with some motion blur."? Look no further!
We are going to take a piece of animated text and "fake"
motion blur by copying the animation and playing with
the alpha of our copy. Before we start click on the
Moving Text image to your right to have a preview of
what we are going to recreate.
Creating the primary animation
What we need is an animation that
we can make a motion blur for. So it's time to open
a new document and create an animation.
Creating and saving a file
- Open flash and create a new document File>New
- Immediately save your file (File>Save) and name it Motnblur.fla. It's always a good idea to save your documents when you first create them. This helps to avoid saving your file somewhere you didn't want to. It also makes it easier to save and save often (command/control•s)
- Go into your movie properties. The easiest way is by double clicking the fps (frames per second) section in the timeline window. Change the dimensions and the frames per second (200 x 200 pixels and 15 fps is what I used for this example).
Creating the text
- Create a new blank symbol (insert > new symbol)
- Name it "Moving text animation" ensure the behavior is a graphic
- Select the text tool. Click anywhere on the stage. Type "Moving Text"
- Choose font and size (my example is in Arial Black, 24 pt)
Animating the text
We are going to create a symbol called "Moving Text" and animate it inside the "Moving text animation". The reason we are animating a symbol inside another symbol will be explained later in this tutorial.
- With the text still selected convert it to a symbol (Insert>Convert to symbol)
- Name it "Moving Text" ensure the behavior is a graphic
- It's now time to create our animation. In the timeline window click on frame 15
- Create a new keyframe (F6)
- Right click (PC), Control click (mac) on the frames in timeline to open the contextual menu. Depending on where you click in flash the contextual menu will change. Make sure that you click on the frames you want to tween (add motion to). Choose Create motion tween from the menu. If you scrub through the animation (move pink rectangle back and forth) you will not see any animation. This is because both keyframes are exactly the same.
- Select the first keframe in your animation.
- Use the free Transform tool (pointer tool in pre MX). Scale, rotate, and/or move the text. If you scrub through the frames you should see the text animating.
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