Question : looping frames

Hi experts,

I am newbie to Flash. I would like to ask some step by step procedure in making my flash works.

Here is what I'm planning to do: First, a text is located to the lower-left of the screen. the text is moved to the right by motion tween. then the text is moved up and down continually.

How can I loop the text moving up and down without repeating the movement of the text to the right?

I am new to flash I don't even know how to use a script. I downloaded some examples but I could not understand them. i am a desktop application programmer and I would like to try flash.

Hope you experts could help me. by the way, im using CS3 flash. Thanks a lot.

Kristofer

Answer : looping frames

Let's go step by step then.

- Create a new flash document
- Select the text tool, click the stage area and write some text, eg "flash"
- Select the selection tool (black arrow) select the text and press F8. This will popup a window to convert to symbol. We are going to transform the text to a movieclip symbol, it is easier to edit text later. Choose movieclip give it a library name of "flashText" and hit ok button.
Now your text is no more editable in the same way. To edit the text double-click it. It will enter symbol edit mode. To go back to the stage click the Scene link just below the timeline.

- Place the text symbol to the left of the stage.

- Now let's create an animation. In the timeline click frame 30. Hit F6, it will create a keyframe.
- In keyframe 30 move the text to the right.
- Click frame 45 and hit F6 to create another keyframe.
- In that keyframe move the text up
 - Click frame 60 and hit F6 to create another keyframe.
- In that keyframe move the text down.
 - Click frame 45 and right click. In the context menu choose "Copy Frames"
- Right-Click frame 75 and choose "Paste Frames"
That way we assure that we have the text going up again to the same position it was in frame 45 so we do not need to do that by hand.

-Now to create the tween, click and drag to select the timeline from frame 1 through 74.
- Go to the properties tab and in Tween combo select Motion Tween. This will show blue inked frames and an arrow from one keyframe to the other. If you hit the enter key animation shows. Now let's do the looping part. This part can be done in some ways. For this I'll choose actionscript, very simple one.
- Click keyframe 75 and hit F9. This will open the action panel. Write this:

gotoAndPlay(45);

This will instruct flash to jump the playhead to frame 45 and continue playing till it reaches frame 75 again and executes the script again. This will loop forever only the part that makes the text go up and down, which is from frame 45 to 75.

Hope this is what you want.