Creating Text

• Drag across the canvas to create a text box. Click the curser inside the box you just made. For instructional purposes, type "Hello World." You can change the font, size, style and text alignment by selecting the text, then clicking on the "Text" tab on the menu bar. Change the font to "Chalkboard".
  
  

Animation Concepts

• Now that we've got a handle on basic text creation in Flash, let' s try some actual animation. There are two ways to create the illusion of motion in Flash: frame by frame, or motion tween. Think of the process in terms of those flipbook animations you used to make in school. In frame by frame, you tell Flash where an object should be in every frame. In motion tween, you tell Flash where an object should be at key points in the animation, and Flash extrapolates all the frames between those key frames.
  
  

The Timeline

• Imagine creating one of those flipbooks, but you only draw a picture on every 10th page. The timeline is like a flipbook, with each frame representing a page. We are going to use motion tween to fill in the frames of our timeline.
  
  To use motion tween, we have to convert the text into a symbol. Do this by taking the black indicator arrow from the tool palette and selecting the block around the text. You can select "Modify" from the menu bar and then choose "Convert to Symbol", or you can just hit "F8." Name the symbol "Hello."
  
  Now, right-click in the timeline on frame 30 and select "Insert Keyframe." Setting keyframe 30 tells Flash that the current position of your text on the stage is where you want it to be by frame 30.
  
  

Motion Tween

• Move your text to the far right of the screen. Using the "Modify" button, change the size of the text and rotate the text 90 degrees clockwise. Now, remember how before we compared this to the flipbooks you made in your youth? Well, if you click on frame 1, you have the first frame of your flipbook. On frame 30, you have the last frame. We have no pages in between. To fix that, right click in the gray area of the timeline, between 1 and 30. Choose "Create Motion Tween". Now Flash has figured out what the middle pages of our flipbook should look like. If you scrub across the timeline, you can see what your animated text will look like.