Animation Reusability

[mgilvey]

Hey, hey,

This is my first post to your wicked-fast board!

I have made an animation that basically takes each letter of a word and builds the word, holds and then does an outro move on screen. For example, let's take the word "MARKETING" I've placed each letter (each converted to it's own symbol) and placed them off screen. When the playhead gets to this sequence each letter goes through some effect (alpha, scale etc) and then assembles in position, hold for a moment and then does more effects (kind of like an explosion) to get off the screen. For this animation (I know I'm being redundant but sometimes it helps) I have each letter as it's own symbol placed into another symbol that animates the letter symbols to create the word "MARKETING". I then placed that animated word symbol into my main scene.

My question (finally) is, if I duplicate the word symbol, can I swap the letters to spell a new word, like "HIT YOUR TARGET" for example? What I want to avoid is having to set the animation for each letter again, I would just like to swap a letter and spell an new word without having to reprogram. I have about 10 or more words to do this way.

[Jesse]

I think what you're after is coverred in this thread:
http://www.actionscripts.org/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=2055

The example there has an effect performed on an empty movie clip basically. Then we duplicate the effect and load in alternate movie clips into the empty clip, which results in those clips having the effect carried out on them

Cheers

Jesse

[mgilvey]

Thanks a lot. I'll check that out.

[mgilvey]

Ok,

Sorry, but the text thread you sent me to is a little "greek" to me. Is there anyway to explain it in layman's terms?

[Jesse]

Not really. This example may be a bit beyond your current level of scripting ability; AS isn't something you can just jump in to.

There is a movie clip. Within that MC we perform actions (in my case a size tween) on another MC which is empty. Then the basic idea is we duplicate the outermost MC (which contains the empty MC) and load a different element into the internal, empty MC< which then results in the loaded element having the effect carried out on it.

Cheers

Jesse

[mgilvey]

Thanks again Jesse,

I think one of my problems is I didn't catch your acronyme "MC" for movie clip in the earlier message. I'll have a hack at it now that you've given me the basic concepts.