Dancing Letters

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A really simple bit of ActionScript can transform static text into something that will really grab the attention of your audience. I'm going a bit crazy with the colours here. Feel free to be a little more conservative.

Start a new movie. Then put in some text (I don't recommend writing your first novel here. Just something short).

Next, select your text (so that you're not editing it) and choose Modify -> Break Apart from the menu. This will separate the individual letters into shapes.

To produce the animation, you need to convert each letter into a Movie Symbol. Select the first shape (the C here) and press F8 or use Insert -> Convert To Symbol. Select Movie Clip from the Behaviour options, and give the symbol a name.



Repeat for the rest of your letters. Once you've done that, Use Ctrl-L or Window -> Library to look at the library. Ensure that you have a Movie Clip symbol for each of your letters. The names aren't important, as long as they're all movie clips.

   

Now you need to name each of the Movie Clip instances on your stage. Double-click on the C symbol (or use Modify -> Instance) to open the Instance Properties dialog box. Type in the Instance Name 'Letter1'. Click on OK. Repeat with each letter in turn, giving them the instance names Letter1, Letter2, Letter3... and so on.

Now comes the scripting!
This is where we add actions to give the letters their hyperactive motion.
Change the name of the layer in your timeline to 'Letters' instead of 'Layer1'. Add another layer to your timeline (Click on the '+' symbol) and name this new layer 'Actions' (you can edit layer names by double-clicking on them). The Actions layer will have one empty keyframe in it. Add a second keyframe immediately after it, and add a normal frame to the 'Letters' layer. Check the screenshot below to make sure you have this right.



Double-click on the first keyframe of the 'Actions' layer to open the Frame Properties dialog. Go to the 'Actions' tab. Add a set of actions using the '+' button. Here's the script (because you won't be able to read it properly from the screenshot).
Note: When you add the actions, ensure that you use the '=' and 'abc' buttons correctly so that the quotation marks are in the right places (and not where they shouldn't be!).

Where I've used 'Loop While n<8', you'll need to insert a number one greater than the number of letters in your text (i.e. 11 if you have 10 letters).
The script is a simple loop which sets 3 properties of each of the movie clips in turn.
I've used random numbers between 1 and 20 for the X Scale, Y Scale and Rotation, then added 90 both the scale numbers (giving a value in the range 90% to 110%), and subtracted 10 from the rotation number (giving a rotation range of -10º to +10º). You can vary these numbers to increase or decrease the amount of scaling or rotation, but I think these values look about right.

Notice that the Instance names are used in these actions. The "/Letter" & n is used to refer to each Movie Clip instance (Letter1, Letter2 etc., depending on the current value of n. That's why it was important to get the names right earlier.

When you've added those actions to the first keyframe in the 'Actions' layer, double-click on the second keyframe to open the Frame Properties dialog again.

Again, go to the Actions tab, and add a single action:

There. All done. Test your movie and laugh at those wacky letters jumping around like fleas...

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