Transformer in Flash

Hi! As you might notice, I have this, um, this Flash video that I made on my desktop. Like, as you can see, it's a guy walking through this machine and it's making him turn into an alien. Now, I made this a couple of years—no, a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a month ago. I decided today, as I was looking through some files, I'm going to make a tutorial showing how to make a video like this.

So if I quit out of Flash Player, I'm going to open Adobe Flash. Okay, so we're going to be using ActionScript 3.0. It doesn't really matter because there's a code for it.

So, first off, what you're going to want is you're going to want that transforming thingy. So I'll just call this layer "Transformer." Layers are basically, um, where things appear. Like, so if the layer is behind another layer, then it'll use—should make a background, something like that.

So now I'm going to be using this tool, and I'm going to use the circle tool to make it, or the oval tool, and I'm going to make it like five Y. So right there, I can make a thing. Why not? There we go!

So now that we have that, first off, we're going to need a guy. So I'll make a new layer and I'll call it "Dude." So, dude, I'll put him in black, and I'm going to use the paintbrush tool. I'm going to make him right there. Okay, so there's a guy—not the best guy, but it doesn't really matter.

So now we're going to want to, um, go back into a frame near the end. Well, not the end, but like a few frames back and click F6. That brings the frames all the way back. So we're going to take this guy, make sure we're in the dude layer, select that one, and click the guy, and make him go all the way over there.

Now we're going to F6 again, and it makes another key. If we click "Create Motion Tween," we'll see that our guy walks across. Obviously, we don't want him going in front of that, but we're going to fix that later. Now, we're going to make another layer called "Alien." So let me rename it "Alien."

Okay, so in the first frame, we're going to—first off, let's make this green. In the first frame, we're going to draw an alien pretty much exactly over this guy. So let's just draw that. Okay, so there's a good alien—good enough.

Now let's go back to this frame. We see that that guy's over there, so if we want the alien moving over at the same speed, we're going to want to drag the alien over. Make sure we're only doing it in one frame, so I’ll do that. Click on this frame and, uh, I don’t know why it's selecting them all.

So we'll just do that and click F6. Yeah, that's not what we wanted to do. Hold on. You want to make sure that it's only selecting one. I don’t know why it’s selecting all in the movie. Maybe you have to press F6. Yeah, that's it—I forgot! You have to press F6 first. That allows you to move it because this is all one big frame.

So then I press F6 again and he's pretty much over. So I can say, um, "Make Motion Tween" and now they're both moving at the same speed. Now to make it so that way you can only see it half of the time, we're going to add a new layer over "Alien." We're going to call this "Alien Mask," and we're also going to add a new layer over "Dude," so click on "Dude," then add new layer and call this "Dude Mask."

Okay, so in "Dude Mask," first, let's do "Dude Mask." We'll make this black or so we don't get confused. A mask is basically where something can appear on the screen with you being able to see it. So if I take the mask and then I take the rectangle tool and draw a mask made for the dude, so the dude will only be able to appear on this side of the screen. Of course, the alien can still appear.

So now we have to go into the "Alien Mask." Oh wait, I forgot to make that a mask. So Ctrl+Click and make it a mask by clicking "Mask." Now it automatically hides masks, but you can unhide it. Now if I go into the "Alien Mask," I'm going to make that green, so we still don't get confused, and we can—I'm going to unhide this that way we can see it.

Make a mask for the alien right there, that way the alien can only appear there. Obviously, you want to make it a mask first, so let's make it a mask, let's make that green, and let's unlock it right there.

So now the alien can only appear there. I don’t know why it's doing that right now. Maybe I got them mixed up, but let’s play. You see a guy, and obviously when he gets out of his mask, we're not going to see him anymore. We're going to see the alien, and the reason why it's doing that is because the masks aren't completely touching.

So if I go into the "Alien Mask" and just stretch it over a little bit by clicking that and stretching it, it should fix the problem. There we go! Now let’s say, okay, first off, let’s hide the masks that way we don’t see them because those get annoying.

Okay! Second off, here we'll hide the people too, unlock too, so the only thing we can see is this. Now I'm going to show you how to make a background—just go behind everything. I'm going to call this "BG" for background, and you don’t have to watch this part of the video if you don’t really care.

So, um, the way I made a background is I just took, uh, yeah—a color like this, and I took the square tool and made a square about that size. So, oh, let’s get rid of that five, make it like a—oh, 0.5. I made a comma instead of point 0.5. Okay, there we go!

So now let’s make that right over there, and let’s take this tool and we’ll curve the line to make a little hill. Also, to make a background, actually, we are going to move that down right there so it gets out of our way. We can just delete this.

Yeah, I’m just checking so that we can still move that. Sometimes Flash is weird, it won’t let you move. So now if we make a blue one—dark blue. Actually, I'm going to change the shade of blue so that it doesn't get mixed up with the, like, transforming thingy, and we can just put it right there.

Now we can drag this back onto that. Okay, like you might be asking how I made that cloud with all the cool effects. What I did is I went into, um, first off, I just made a cloud with the white thingy. So just draw a cloud—it doesn't have to look cool or anything—might not be able to see it very well, but as soon as I move it on, you'll be able to see.

Now we're going to want to Ctrl+Click and say, "Convert to Symbol." Symbols, basically, um, let you have more effects and stuff, so we're going to call it a "Movie Clip," meaning you can edit into it.

And, um, yeah! So if you want to make, like, an animation where there's a play button, you're going to want to make it a button and then put some codes that way if you play it, you'll do that. But I might make a video on that later.

So now I can go—so now you see the cloud is one object, it doesn’t like go around it. So now I can go into filters, I can add one, and I can say, um, I'll make it glow. So now you see that little glow. I can also add a, like, a bevel. Yeah!

And so, yeah, also I'll make lightning like I had in my other one. So line tool—yellow. Make the line tool yellow and I'll make the thickness like a three. Okay, so now we can lock the background and let’s play.

So, as you notice, it's a pretty good thing for something that just took you like a couple of—like seconds to make. And if you want, I'll compare it to my other one. Documents, downlo.com/flash. Here are a few Flash things I’ll make. You can see them on my website, john.com. Just click on "Music and Movies," and there's a Flash button. You can see a lot of my Flash animations.

So, "Transformer.swf," now you'll see how similar they are. That was my tutorial. Thank you for watching!