Revolving Text

Create a revolving text effect in Flash.

Please install Flash

Step 1

Begin by starting a new movie: File » New. Then go to Modify » Movie and change the width and height to whatever your preference might be. The one I’m making is Width: 200 Height: 50. Then make a new symbol (Button) by going Insert » New Symbol and name it Button1 and behavior as a button. On the white screen, draw what you want the button to look like, just as I have and make sure you have text in it.

Example 1

Step 2

After you have made the graphic in the “Up Frame”, right click on “Over” near the top left hand side and chose Insert Keyframe. Everything should remain the same except there should be a dot inside the “Over” at the top and your image should be highlighted in blue.

Example 2

Step 3

Alright, with your image highlighted, chose Insert » Convert to Symbol. Name can be called Movie1 and behavior is as a Movie Clip. Right click on your image, which should now be a movie clip, and choose Edit In Place. Here is where we will make our animation which will occur when you put your mouse over the button.

Example 3

Step 4

What you want to do at this point is to separate the text from the rest of the button. So you select the text and Edit » Cut. Then Press the New Layer button and press Edit » paste Name the layer “Text” by double clicking on the left where it says “Layer 2”. Lastly, lock the other layer which contains all the other graphics besides the text.

Example 4

Step 5

Alright, here comes the most tedious part of the tutorial. Select the text and press Modify » Break Apart. All the letters are separate now. You may want to zoom in, but now you must select each text character, press Edit » Cut, start a new layer and Edit » paste, just like we did earlier in Step 4, but after pasting each letter, you must also press Modify » Group so each letter stands on its own.

Example 5

Step 6

Okay, now you add a keyframe in the tenth and twentieth frames on all the layers inside there. Now go to the tenth frame, zoom in, and revert all the characters by clicking on each character, pressing the scale button and having a mirror image of each text while keeping it aligned so it looks like the image on the left.

Example 6

Step 7

Next, you want to create a motion tween from the 1st to the 10th and then from the the 10th to the 20th frame on all the layers which have letters in them. You do this by going to each layer’s first frame and going to the Frame Tab in Flash 5 and setting it up to look like the figure on the left. Make sure you select CW (Clockwise). You want to go through and do the same thing on frame 10 on all the layers. Finally, last step is to Press File » Publish Preview » Default(HTML) and make sure it works :)

Note: This tutorial was originally authored by my friends at Spoono.com. This revised version is available on Absolute Cross with permission.

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