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

By Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com

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Introduction and Recap

When we last left off, we'd pieced our characters together in Flash and grouped their various pieces into major groups inside movie clip symbols. I've taken the time to adjust Lex a little, changing the positions of his arms and such slightly so they fit and hang a bit more naturally.

I've also cleaned up my layers a bit. You may have noticed, when you were grouping your pieces into various limbs or sections, that the symbol that resulted was placed on a single layer, leaving the rest of the layers that held the composite parts empty--marked by a clear dot where it was once black, denoting a blank keyframe. You can delete the empty layers, which will make navigating your animation much easier. I'm left with the following layers: Left Arm, Head, Trunk, Right Arm, and Background (in that order so that they composite properly).

Those layers will not remain intact inside your symbols, either. If you're working with vector fills in Flash rather than imported transparent GIFs, you had to convert each of your separate parts into a symbol on its own before grouping it into the overall limb's movie clip, or you may have difficulties separating them again later when working inside the movie clip.

This will be a fairly simple lesson. Before we get into animating the limbs, we're going to add speech bubbles--we'll learn about adding actual audio tracks later--to learn about working with text in Flash.

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