Text Animation Motion Preset and Flash CS5.5

In this tutorial, we will use the built-in Motion Presets in Flash^R CS5.5 to create a movie trailer style title sequence for an iPad book app entitled Dracula's Guest.

We will start with a new ActionScript 3.0 project in Flash.

Click File - New from the Menubar. In the New Document dialog box, choose ActionScript 3.0 and click OK.
Let's set the background color to a dark blue to blend well with the pages of the book app. From the Menubar, click Format - Document Settings. In the dialog box, set the Background Color box to #000033.

Another option that we have is to use a graphic from the app as the background image for our trailer.
Rename Layer 1 to "title". With the Text tool selected, set the Fill Color to white.
Set the Character options in the Properties panel.

Family - Apple Chancery
Size - 60pt

Our next step is to convert the text to a movie clip before we can animated the text.
Right-click on the text on the stage and choose Convert to Symbol from the pop-up menu. Name the movie clip "title_1" because it will be the first text that we animate in our movie trailer.

Now we can test a few of the Motion Presets with our movie clip. A few good presets for animating text are fly-in-blur and flyin-pause-flyout. Let's try the Zoom-in-2D preset.
Select the Zoom-in-2D preset and click the Apply button. You will get a message indicating that some of the effects from the preset could not be applied to the text. This is fine for our project.
On the Timeline, you will see a new Tween animation has been applied which spans 25 frames.
Click Control - Test Movie - In Flash Professional. The preset animation is easy to use because it has the easing built in but it's a little too fast.
Let's lengthen the duration of the animation by increasing the number of frames. Place your cursor over the end of the span until you see the double arrows. Click and drag the end of the span from Frame 25 to Frame 60.
Test the movie again and, now that we have slowed the animation, we can better see the easing as the text slows to a stop and the blur effect is more pronounced.

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	Diane Cipollo BellaOnline's Flash and Animation Editor