Screencast on making text write itself in Flash

Submitted by Alcapwn on Tue, 2009-11-03 23:08

In this Screencast i show you how to reverse animate a text so that it looks as if it is writing itself. It is a useful technique that can be used in your illuminated text as well as other projects. Important hotkeys i used: Shift+B= Break apart text /  f6=Create new keyframe

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hippopatrol's picture

thanks!

Submitted by hippopatrol on Tue, 2010-11-02 23:58.

 It's too bad that the video for this is kind of laggy. Me and my partner tried doing this and it didn't turn out so well. First of all, we forgot to make the text a bitmap by breaking it apart twice. We messed up on that so the 'R' on our word is missing a part of it so we ended up having to draw that in on the last frames. And second of all, we erased our letters in big chunks as in like the whole stroke of a letter versus doing it little by little so as a result, it looks kind of choppy. So I suggest trying this out first before you include in your final presentation!

fivestar29's picture

Not as bad as I thought

Submitted by fivestar29 on Tue, 2010-11-02 23:39.

I have to admit, when I first saw this I thought to, "myself no way, i am not doing this," but I was running out of transition options. I was stuck on fading in and out, and I didnt want to overuse the morphing from words to shapes and vise versa either, so I decided to give it a shot. It actually wasn't that bad, it didn't take as long as I thought it would, but it took some careful work. It really helped emphasize on some phrases to the fact that the words were "writing themselves". For example, there's a line in my poem: "And be known," where I wanted it to be seen as important. so I made the "And be" just pop up on the screen and then had known "write itself". It helped a lot. Thanks!

littlemissgiggles's picture

Awesome and easy effect

Submitted by littlemissgiggles on Mon, 2010-11-01 15:11.

This screencast was extremely helpful in adding variety to transitions between lines. Erasing parts of the letters and reversing the frames is an easy and interesting way to introduce phrases.  Even thought it is a bit tedious to erase each section of each letter, with time and care, it can look very fluid. Just make sure you don't hit the remove keyframe button, always click reverse frames!