How to do a Star Wars Crawl

May 23, 2005 1:50 PM

How can I create a Star Wars-type crawl in Flash?
posted by Taken Outtacontext to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

(Do you know enough Flash for t(he following to make sense?)

-- type the first line of text and convert it into a Symbol.

-- Now make a bunch of Library Symbols, one for each line of text. IE. Symbol 1 would say "A Long Time Ago" and Symbol 1 would say "In A Galaxy Far, Far Away" and so on.

-- arrange them all below the Stage, all in the exact same potion:

STAGE==|
STAGE==|
STAGE==|
blah blah blah <-- 40 instances all at the same x,y coordinates! (all on top of each other)


-- select all your instances and choose Modify > Timeline > distribute to Layers (this supposes you have MX or MX2004 -- if you don't, you'll have to laboriously move each line to a different layer). Remove the now empty Layer 1.

-- select down a column of frames a ways into your timeline (say frame 90). In other words, click frame 90 in the top layer and then shift+click frame 90 in the bottom layer (or just drag down the column to highlight all the frames in it).

-- press F6 to add keyframes in every layer at frame 90.

-- with the playhead at frame 90, select all the layers (PC:CTRL+A -- MAC: COMMAND+A), and drag them -- as a group -- to the center of the stage. Enter zero in both the Width and Height settings in the properties panel.

-- select all the frame ones and turn on Motion Tweening.

NOTE: You will now have an animation of all the layers, as a group, moving to the center and getting smaller (like the Star Wars titles).

-- now offset each subsequent layer's animation in time. For instance, select frames 1 - 90 in the second layer and drag those frame 10 frames to the right, so that it moves to the center (and gets smaller) from frames 10 - 100. Offset the next layer to 20 - 110 and so on.

NOTE: for me, an easier solution would be to use Actionscript, but you didn't ask for a scripting solution.
posted by grumblebee at 2:23 PM on May 23, 2005

Response by poster: I can follow you. Thanks grumblebee. Now I have to try it to see if I can *really* follow you. -g But on a first reading it make sense.

If an actionscript solution would be simpler, fire away. And THANKS!
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 4:17 PM on May 23, 2005