Flash Animation 6: Using Text in Flash to Give Your Character a Voice

Unless your animated character is a mime (or you just really enjoy silent film), you'll more than likely want him/her to have a voice. Your character(s) may be telling a story, interacting with other characters, but either way you'll need speech to do so. Adding audio to Flash files makes for some time-consuming downloads, and synching to audio is a bit more difficult than the current level of our lessons, so how do we make our characters speak without a vocal soundtrack?

The answer is using text in Flash, in much the same ways that artists use text in printed comics. We're going to make some old-style cartoony "speech bubbles", and then animate our text appearing inside them.

I know you're probably eager to dive into animating your character, but when it comes to planning out your animation, it'll be easier for you in the long run if you write out your script and do your text first. This will let you time your text and plan out when you want your characters to perform certain gestures or movements, so that later you can match the movements to the text--rather than guessing at when certain actions should happen, before trying to match the text to it later and having to edit and re-edit.

That...was a horrific run-on sentence.