- Start a new movie. Modify the movie, choosing a background color and
the size of the canvas. I used 550 by 100 as my canvas size and choose back
as my background. Your canvas size will depend on the size of the text you
are animating.
- Type the text you wish to animate. I used a large size text. Choose a
font that represents cursive writing. Open the character panel (Window>Panels>Character)
to see your options.
- Align the text on the canvas by opening the align panel (Window>Panels>Align).
Make sure you click the "to stage" button so that Flash knows that
you want the text to be aligned to the stage. Click the top two alignment
options (the middle buttons represent the center alignment). The top left
choice aligns the text horizontally on the canvas. The top right aligns the
text vertically on the canvas.
- Select the text by clicking on it with the arrow tool and break the text
apart (Modify>Break Apart).
- Insert a keyframe (Press F6) in frame two.
- Choose the eraser tool. In the Options section of the Toolbox, choose
a shape (square probably works best) and a size (depending on the actual size
of your font).
- Erase the the section that will appear last, which is the exclamation
mark at the end of the line. The last letter in your text is what you want
to erase.
- Insert another keyframe in frame three and erase another part of the
text, working from the right to the left in the backward order in which it
was written.
- Now you have probably figured out that you are going in reverse order.
This is one feature in flash that is much overlooked. Save your movie and
then select all the keyframes you have created. (Click the first keyframe,
press Shift key, and click the last keyframe.) If you frames do not all appear
black, click the Shift key then select each frame individually.
- Choose Modify>Frames>Reverse.
- Choose Control>Play to play the animation.