Subtitles of the Movie

Like most properties in Combustion, you can animate text or anything that has a gradient in it so that the actual gradient itself moves. Imagine animating a sunrise or a sunset or creating some type, as we're about to do right now and then having the gradient move within the letters themselves. Let's go ahead and do that by creating a brand new Paint Operator. So we're going to go to File, New. We're going to make sure we have our type set to Paint and since we are going to animate, we want a duration here. So if you don't have anything at all, click one time and just enter a number. I'm going to put 300 just to get a couple of seconds going as you see I have here. So I don't have any hours, I don't have any minutes but I have ten seconds and I have zero frames. I'll click OK and what I want to do is create some type. So in my toolbar, I click once on the T to invoke my Text Editor and I'm going to choose a different font here as well; a nice thick font like Arial Black and I'm going to type something here. Just type sunset and then I'm going to click on my Black Arrow here and I'm going to pan down so I can get this word and just reposition it so I can actually see it. I'm also going to change the size quite a bit so we have a nice, dramatic effect. Now, there are two ways we can put some gradient in here. One way, of course, is by going to the Gradient Button and double clicking on the swatch. Or we could also, of course, go to the Gradient Section here, the Gradient Button and already have our controls ready to go. So since we're doing a sunset, let's go ahead and add two tags here. I'll add one here and one here. And I'll go to click on this tag to change the color to a nice, dark blue. And as you see, we have a nice bright color here. So let me think here. We want the sun to set so the sun should be bright up here and dark down here. I'm actually going to click once on this tag and show you a different way to change it. We can actually click on the tag, make sure it's yellow and then click on a color. So we have this effect. And what I want to do as well is since the sun's going to set, I want to make sure that the tags are pretty far apart. And we're going to animate this one going up like this. So that the sun seems to be going away. Maybe over some mountains. Now all we have to do at this point is click on the Animate Button to make our changes. Once this is on, Combustion will watch what we do and change it for us. So let's think about this. On our first frame our controls are set, the colors are set and what we have to do now is go to the very end of our animation by clicking here and changing the tags around. So I'm just going to move this one like so until the sun appears no more. I'll turn Animate off, return to my first frame and press Play. And now the sun is going down, or the mountains are getting closer, one of the two and you have a really nice sunset effect.