How do I draw arrows for callouts?

[Patty Civalleri]

Hi, I'd like to have an arrow draw itself and point to a piece of machinery. I need to re-use it several times, and change it slightly each time.

Here's what happens: In frame one, I draw a short line. I create a motiontween to keyframe at 15. In 15, I scale the line (to extend the length) but it extends BOTH ends instead of one. It seems to extend correctly if there is no tween. But as soon as I add the tween then extend the line, it extends both ends.

If I extend the line first, then add the tween, it just jumps from the short line to the long line in 15. It doesn't draw the line out frame-by-frame.

Help...

patty

[Jesse]

I hope you're making your like a graphic or MC symbol, or using a shape tween. You can't motion tween a vector based line, you have to either (i) shape tween it (because it's a shape) or; (ii) convert it to a graphic of movie clip then motion tween it...

Flash will probably be trying to keep the centre point the same so that's why it's expanding in both directions...

Cheers

Jesse

[CoolJim]

Soo... if i undestood you right,Patty, you wanna add some call outs to frames.I think you should use this (http://presentavid.com/) for ur purpose. This proggy allows to add different lines, create and add call outs of various shape with text in.