© Xara Group 2008

Now you want to color your flakes. I wanted to make mine a

lighter shade of my blue background color, so I opened the

Color Editor again and then selected ‘Shade of another

color’ in the drop down menu. It automatically selected my

blue Theme Color 1 as the parent color since it’s the only

Named Color in this document. I changed it to a lighter

shade of blue and gave the new color a name ‘Linked Color’.

This now appears on the Color Line next to Theme Color 1.

In fact I decided it would be better if all the flakes

had a slightly different color, so I selected each

flake individually, selected the Fill tool and dragged

across the flake to give it a graduated color fill from white

to my Linked Color 1, each flake with a slightly different

graduation.

I also applied different levels of flat transparency to each

flake, to give a good variety of different flakes, with varying

colors and transparency (note it must be flat transparency -

you can’t combine grad transparency with grad color fills in

Flash). Select your flake, go to the Transparency tool and

adjust the transparency level with the slider.

The design needs more flakes but you can save time by just

making copies. I copied my 6 basic flakes and made a total

of 18 flakes of various sizes. Arrange the flakes into two

groups, group them (I have selected 12 flakes in the top

group, then click Ctrl + G) and give the groups names,

‘Flakes 1’ and ‘Flakes 2’ (as before, select a group, click the

Name icon on the InfoBar, enter the name).

This is what my arrangement looked like at this stage. Note

the main group of flakes is mostly outside the blue

background area, because I want it to look like the snow is

falling from above. The flakes outside my page area won’t

be visible in my animation because they outside the page

(animation) size.

Also you need to introduce the first line of the text

message in Frame 1. The effect we want is a text

message that fades in and grows larger - you can do

that by putting some transparent text in this frame, then

making it visible and larger in the next frame. So, select

the Text tool and type ‘Seasons Greetings’ in a small point

size below the bottom of the blue background, make it

100% transparent (that means you can’t see it unless you

change to Outline view - that is, move the quality slider to

the far left). Name the text object ‘Text’.

Change the Timings

Before we move onto Frame 2 we’ll change the

speed of the animation by adjusting the timing of

the first frame. Open the Frame Gallery and double click

on the Frame 1 name to open the frame Properties, and

change the time from 0.5 to 6 seconds. This means it will

take 6 seconds to animate ‘tween’ from key frame 1 to 2.

Xara Xtreme - Xmas Flash Animation -2-

A Named Color that is a shade of Theme Color 1

The final image for Frame 1