Subtitles of the Movie

Two new commands you'll find in the modify menu are Break Apart and Distribue to Layers. These commands can be particularly useful when you want to create tween animation. Let's look at an example. I'll select the text tool, drag it to the stage, and enter the letters V,T,C. Now what I like to do is take this text and have it fly together to form the letters V,T,C from the sides of the screen and merging in the center. However, since it is one text box this is not easily accomplished. Using Flash 5 or an earlier version of Flash, I would need to create the letter V, the letter T, the letter C and I would place those each on their own individual layers one by one; trying my best to make sure that the alignment was right. It's a lot easier in Flash MX to accomplish this same task. I'll show you how now. First select the text; as you can see it is selected with the blue outline. I will go to the modify menu, select break apart and you can see the V, the T and the C have now been separated into their own individual letters with one simple command. Now, I'll take the same three objects, I'll go select them, go back to the modify menu and select "distribue to layers." Now notice that the letters V, T,C have been placed on their own individual layer. Also notice that Flash was kind enough to create the letter V, the letter T and the letter C for the name of these layers which makes it alot easier tracking down which one is which. I'll go ahead and delete the initial layer and I'll check the V, check the T and the C and notice that they are all selected separately. Let's animate this now. Let's create one frame 12 for instance; we'll go ahead and select these three, insert the key frames by hitting the F6 and this is our final destination of the text we won't have to merge together. I'll go back to the first frame, I'll take the V and I'll move it up to the left; I'll take the C and I'll move it down to the right; and let's take the T and drag it somewhere over here. Now select the first three layers again, go down to the property inspector, go to motion tween and we verify that we have the arrows, which means we have good proper tweens. Let's drag through and see how it looks in slow motion, just what we want. Ok, let's press enter to press play and we'll do it again and that looks good. So you can see how easy it is by using the two commands, Break apart and Distribute to Layers, to easily create animated effects with text using tweens on their own separate layers. I can honestly say that these two commands combined have more than paid for my investment in Flash in the amount of time they've saved me. You can do much more with it than just the text like we've done here, you can break apart graphic objects, many different things; but this is simply an example to show you the power of break apart and distribute to layers. I hope you'll enjoy using it in your projects as well. eak apart and distribute to layers. I hope you'll enjoy using it in your projects as well.