Handwriting Effect

This is a simple yet cool effect. This tutorial was done in Flash MX 2004, so the location of some of the menu bar things will be different in from MX, but of course it will work just as well in MX.

Step 1. Make a new document I doesn't have to be very big. I made mine 280x80. You have to have a good handwritten style font (I'm using a font called "scripty"). You can download it here.

Step 2. Once you have your font you may have to close down and restart Macromedia Flash because it loads your computers fonts when you start it up. Grab your text tool and put a line of text in the middle of the canvas that says "handwriting". Make it pretty large (I had mine at 60). Now Go to Modify > Convert to Symbol and call it "handwriting".

Step 3. Now double click on you new symbol to edit it. Select frame 2 and hit F6 to make keyframe. Now with your frame 2 selected, hit ctrl+B twice to break apart the text. Now's where the fun begins. Now grab the erase tool and start erasing the letter g starting from the bottom, but only erase about a quarter of the tail off the g (look at the picture to the right). Now select frame 3 and hit F6 to make another keyframe and erase a little bit more of the letter g from were you left off. Now make another keyframe in frame 4 and erase more of the letter g. Do you understand what we are doing yet? You are going to continue this for the rest of your letter g and all your letters. The trick is to think about how you would write the letters on a piece of paper. When you write down the letter g you make the loop first and then you make the tail. So you want to do the exact opposite, erase the tail first and then start erasing the loop starting from the inside. Get it? Well, since I don't know what you just said I'll assume that its "I sure do!". The same go's for the t and the i's, people cross the t and dot the i's after they have made there vertical line.

Step 4. Ok, so now you have spent way too much time on the last step and you got all the letters completely erased on the last frame. Select all the frames in the layer (you can do this by clicking the layer name) and go to Modify > Timeline > Reverse Frames. Now your frames have been reversed and you can play scrub the timeline to see that its working the way that you want it to. Now you can put in a stop action on the last frame to stop it from looping. And that's it!