Girl Shapes

Introduction

This effect was presented earlier in our website Flash Star Effects but if you click the link you will find indications of how to create everything but the girl shape that swings. So this is what we are going to do here. We got the shape of the girl from a font which we broke on the stage. We are going to discuss the last two layers inside the Movie Clip, placed on the layer "girl" in the Main Stage.

The Effect

First thing you can notice in the source file is the Mask Layer. Obviously this layer determines the area where the effect is visible. The mask was drawn by using the brush tool over the desired places.

This is the shape we got from the special font we used. As you see it has all we need. The only modification we did is we added extra strings (with the line tool).

Now let's get back to the masked layer. Here we do the motion, in fact the slight rotation that gives the impression that the girl is swinging. We used Tween Motion to rotate the Clip around the center point, placed somewhere above. But if we let the Clip with the girl like this, the motion wouldn't be natural because the girl has to bend to give the impression that she wants to maintain speed. Double click over the Clip with the girl, and you will see that we split the girl in couple of pieces, each one placed on a different layer.

We explained in the section dedicated to the first effect on this website how to cut wisely the shape so go back if you need extra information.

Here are the different shapes that combined, create the girl:

So what we did in this Clip is we made the transition between the 2 instances of the girl. It's easy to understand from the picture, how we did that. We did Tween Motion for all the elements so we will skip this easy task to explain a more complex one.

This clip needs to be controlled with some Action Script code because are there are 3 positions for the girl. First one is the normal position that lasts until the girl gets to the highest point, and then the girl bends (action triggered by a small script). The third one is the bended girl. So how do the transition between these?

This is one option.

Look at the picture and notice how we arranged the frames. The numbers correspond to the different instances we wrote earlier.

In the Main Stage we initialized the variable c with the value 0. This is the code in the second frame from the picture.

stop();
if( _root.c == 1 ) { 
    play();
}
if( _root.c == 0 ) {
    gotoAndPlay(1);
}

This means that if c gets the value 1, the girl will start to bend (because the clip enters in the second area). And we give _root.c the needed value in the _parent clip, the one that does the general movement in the right moment (couple of frames before the clip reaches the highest position). So in conclusion, if _root.c==0 the clip will only play frames 1 and 2 , passing over and over from 2 to 1 until _root.c becomes 1. We also need to stop the clip in the last frame so it remains in the last position (3).

That's all you need to know about this effect. Enjoy!