© Xara Group 2008

In the Frame Gallery. Select Frame 1 and click Copy to

create the second frame that is an exact copy of the first.

Move the two groups of flakes vertically down the frame.

Increase the size of the flake groups (by about 200% in my

example).

To give some randomness to the movement of the snow

flakes, Ctrl + click to select individual flakes inside the

groups and adjust their transparency and position. You can

also rotate each flake by 180 degrees - the easiest way to

do that is to enter a value of 180 in the angle of field on

the top Selector Tool InfoBar.

Change the Color

Our animation fades from blue to an

orange-red color. If we were to simply

edit the Theme Color 1, then all

graphics, across all frames would

change color. So we need to be a bit sneaky to create a

second Named Color.

The first stage is to edit the Theme Color 1 to be your

required second color. Just right click on the Theme Color 1

on the Color Line and select Edit. After you’ve made your

change, Select All on the Frame 2 (Ctrl+A) and copy this to

the clipboard. Then undo the color change you just made -

you may have to Undo twice to get back to the blue colors.

Now delete everything on Frame 2, and Paste in Place

(Ctrl+Shift+V) which puts the re-colored graphics back on

Frame 2. You now have two Named Colors on the color line

and you can now change the color of all

the graphics on Frame 1 and 2

independently.

Move the text

The ‘Seasons Greetings’ text is invisible

still, so go into Outline View so you can

see it. Enlarge and re-position it, and

adjust the Transparency to be 0%, so it

should look like this on the left.

Now is a good time to preview

your animation. Click on the

Preview Flash icon on the top

animation toolbar and hopefully you will

see something like this. Not bad for a

two frame animation.

One last thing for Frame 2. I introduced some transparent

text immediately under Seasons Greetings (my text says

‘from all at Xara’ across two lines), which I want to fade

in to end my animation.

So create your text, make it small and completely

transparent, and give it a name, as described before, say

‘FinalText’. I have placed it in the center of the image,

but you can make its start position anywhere.

Xara Xtreme - Xmas Flash Animation -3-

Select Frame 1 and click Copy to create Frame 2

The final image for Frame 2

(The Outline view shows the tiny

transparent text in the center, that will

expand in the final Frame 3)