I want my text to appear letter by letter, drawing the reader's eye along as Lex speaks. That sounds like it could be a pain, but it won't be. First I'm going to extend my animation; so far everything's resting on a single frame. I want to have at least as many frames as I do letters; there are 27 characters in my speech block, including punctuation but not including spaces. So I'm going to copy my keyframes on frame one in each of my layers and paste them out to frame 36, to extend the currently-static scene out for three seconds (remember, we're working at 12 frames per second). We'll touch on why I made it 36 frames instead of 27 later in the lesson.
Just to make things easier later on, let's move the first frame of the text layer to frame 8. Just drag it to the appropriate frame; this will clear out frames 1-7. If you have problems with Flash repositioning the text, just copy your keyframe from your very last frame to frame 8. Now the text won't start to appear until frame 8, giving a slight pause to take in the scene and your character before the viewer is distracted by speech.
