How we did the falling stars

Because the nature of this website is to explain effects related to object with a star shape, we will not discuss how the girl was designed but only the stars (bookmark WebArticles.org because we will explain that effect on another website soon). Here you'll learn the way the falling stars were created, from the inside out (from the deepest Movie Clip to the "surface").

• first thing you have to do is find a star, and here's our tip: use star shapes from fonts like Wingdings, Stars1, Stars2 (use the text tool to create a star and then break it - CTRL-B twice)






• place the star inside a Movie Clip a do the followings: in the first 10 frames place pairs of two frame, the first one with full color and the second with transparency, then fade out the star in the next couple of frames
• stop the Movie Clip in the last frame by adding "stop()" on another layer (usually name it "Actions" and use it only for Action Script)
• so the result is a star that blinks 5 times then fades out
• but we need the star to fall down, so we place the last Movie Clip created, in another Movie Clip and move it down during 40 frames ( only 20 frames the star will be seen because at frame 21 it will be totally faded so you can use any number of frames for the movement, but it has to be greater than 21)
• so now we have a star that blinks and fades while it falls down
• next faze is adding the stars to the girl's feet; we will use a lot of instances of this Movie Clip to create the effect
• we will use a new Movie Clip to accommodate the girl and the stars
• the last two layers create the girl that swings (stay tuned on WebArticles.org to learn how to do that), from frame 1 to frame 22 the girl goes up and then comes down until frame 42
• the technique for placing the stars is very simple: start from frame one, place three four instances of the Movie Clip with the star near the girl's feet, then in frame two Insert a KeyFrame and do the same (three, four in the new position of the girl's feet)and so on until frame 42
• why this works? Well, every time you create a new KeyFrame, the new frame will be a copy of the last frame so it will contain all the stars previously created, and the "life" (consecutive frames which contain the object) of a star will end at the last frame, that meaning the star will blink, fade and fall as we planed
• if between the first and the last frame of one star's "life" on one frame we don't have the star, on the next frame the star will start from the top blinking, fading and moving all over again and you will have a star appearing in the wrong place






• but in our example we don't have starts in the firs two and last two frames of the actual effect; that's because in our case in those examples the girl is outside the Mask so in those frames the girl can't be seen
• we also paused adding the stars when the girl was near frame 21 because she moves just a bit in those frames so there's no need of more starts
• the layer with the stars continues from frame 42 until frame 63 because the last stars placed need an extra 21 frames to complete the effect (so the finish can be somewhere after frame 63)
• the Actions layer (part of the swinging effect) continues the animation until frame 84 so the girl will appear to swing continuously, even if we can see just half of it
• that's all, good luck at your own animations