Working With Flash Motion Presets

In the last tutorial, we created the first part of our Flash^R Thanksgiving animation. We used a Motion Preset to make our "Happy Thanksgiving" bounce onto the stage. Now, we will refine this animation and add a second Motion Preset.

Open your fla file into Flash CS4. At this point we have two layers and one motion tween which ends on Frame 75. I decided to make a few changes to the animation to make it fit into my plans for the project. The first change was to adjust the tween path for the animation.

At this point, the path extends down and stops just above the bottom leaves. Because I will be adding more text and another motion preset under this text, I need to move the end of the tween path upward until it ends in the center of the stage. To do this, I simply click and drag the end point of the path with the Selection tool.

This part of the animation is almost done but I wanted the text to be a little larger. To do this, I decided to enlarge the text on Frame 75. This will make the text grow a little taller when the text stops bouncing.
To enlarge the text on Frame 75, I used the Free Transform tool and dragged the top of the bounding box upward until the text was about twice as tall as before.

Now I'm ready to work on the second animation. After the "Happy Thanksgiving" text stops, I would like to add a second tween with the text "From Our House To Yours".
Our first step is to add a new layer to the Timeline and name it "From Us". Because we don't want this text to be visible until Frame 75, we need to add a Keyframe on this new layer on Frame 75. This will cause the second tween to begin on Frame 75.
Now we can add the second line of text. Use the Text tool as you did before. You might want to set the text a little smaller in size (25pt) and a different color (#4e4500).
Now it's time to apply a new Motion Preset. For the example, I choose the Fly-in-Blur-Right which will cause the text to move onto the stage from the right. As before, the Motion Preset needs to know where the text should be at the beginning of the animation. Therefore, I moved the text off the stage on the right. This will allow enough room for the text to fly onto the stage.
We now have 89 frames on the Timeline. Right-click on frame 89 of the Background layer and Insert a Frame to extend the background to the new end of the movie.
We also need to extend the Happy Thanksgiving layer. Because we have a Motion Tween on this layer, we need to do something different. On Frame 75, select the text and click Edit - Copy. Now add a new layer named "Happy Thanksgiving 2". On Frame 76, add a Keyframe and click Edit - Paste In Place. Still on this new layer, right-click on Frame 89 and Insert a Frame.
Test your movie and save it in the default .fla format.

In the next tutorial, we will finish the project and add a "Replay" button.

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