Difficult text

[Timmonsxp]

Hello I have reached a point in my animation that is leaving me clueless. I have this movie clip I have made and I wanted to do something that seems simple yet is not working out for me.

In my animation I have a couple layers.

Phone Layer is the layer on top. It shows a hand grasping a phone and watching something on the phone when it reaches the tween.

Base is two circle shapes on top of each other to show the figure of a ceiling Fan and the light. The reason they are in this order is so the Phone layer shows over the fan.

Fan layer is just the fan blades doing rotations.

Back is just a simple gradient background.

The issue I am having is. I want text to scroll from right to left on the phone only. Kind of like what you see when there are tornado warnings etc. on your news channel on the tv at the bottom. It seems easy but I cant figure it out.

I've tried making the hand and the phone seperate. With the Hand layer being above the phone and text being in between them both. for exampe.

Hand:

Text:

Phone:

I used "T" and wrote out my text. it was really long and stretched to the far right. I then made a keyframe further down the text timeline. and moved the text really far to the left until the last word was to the left of the phone. I made a classic tween so that the long text would shift from far right. to far left. making it so the text seemed as if it was scrolling that way.

It worked for the most part. The text played its tween and moved left. It didnt show over the Hand layer because the hand layer was above it but it showed on the phone layer only.

However when I went to use it in my movie clip it wouldnt work because I have other layers. for example.

Hand:

Text:

Phone:

Base:

Fan:

Back:

Since my Back(Background) layer is a grayish gradient and my text is white. It showed all the time no matter what because the Text layer was above it. Is there any way around this. I know it probably sounds confusing the way I've put it.

Please help if you have any ideas.

[Colin Holgate]

Hard to fully picture your setup, but make sure the textfield has the font embedded, if it's a dynamic textfield.

The scrolling text ought to be inside the phone movieclip. That way you don't have to tween the text, it will follow along with the phone movement.

Also, use a mask layer so that only the area over the phone display will show the text. That mask would be inside the phone as well, and masking the text layer.

[Timmonsxp]

Okay so I went into my phone movieclip where I want the text to play. I don't really want to move the Hand or the phone in this movie clip. I just want it to play the text from left to right.

In this movieclip I have the Hand drawing seperated from the phone. I get what you mean by I need to mask but i have never masked before. I get the idea from some videos. Basically I have to create an area in the phone screen that shows the text only. Since I havent done it before I don't know which layer to do it. Do I make a new layer, place it under Phone. Make a rectangle inside the phone on the new layer. Put my text into it and then mask the phone layer?

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

You would have one layer which is your animated text (on top of the phone layer), and then another new layer above that, which would be a rectangle shape in the location of the phone's screen. Once you have made the rectangle and it's in the right place, blocking the view of the phone and the text, right-click on the layer name and change the layer to be Mask.