By Matt Fussell
You are absolutely unlimited when it comes to effects in Adobe Flash. You can create all kinds of cool animations. On this page, we'll take a look at creating animated text that appears to slowly fade. This is a great effect and one of my favorites.
The first thing you will need to do is open up a new Adobe Flash file. Select action script 3.0.
Type the text on the stage. Next, right click on the text. Select "Break Apart". You'll notice that each letter in your text now has a box around it. Now right click again on the text and select "Distribute to Layers".
Now you'll notice that each letter has it's own layer. You'll now want to go to each letter and convert each letter to a symbol. To do this right click on each letter and select "Covert to Symbol". Choose "movie clip" for symbol type. Next, go to about frame "20". Highlight every layer in frame "20" by holding down shift and selecting all of the layers. Right click and select "Insert Keyframe". Use the Black Arrow tool to select the text again. In your properties menu, under "Color Effect" and again under "Style", select "Alpha". If you can't find your properties menu, go under "Window" and select "Properties".
Slide the "Alpha" to "0". Next, insert a classic tween into each layer. This will allow for the fading animation effect that we are going for. Move each tween to be in a random position. Lastly, fill in the blank frames left from moving your tweens. Copy the frames from the beginning of each of the tweens to fill in the blank frames. I know, it's a little confusing. That's why I have included the video.
The following video shows you how to create animated fading text in Adobe Flash...
