Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Posted: 09 Aug 2009 03:43 AM PDT

Lightning is something that amazes a lot of people. Because of its beauty, many want to create it, but it is impossible to do the natural way. So here is a tutorial on how to create a lightning effect using Flash.

Create a new Flash document. To do this, go to File >New. Select Flash Document. Click OK. You will need your own image for this. I have a selected the statue of Liberty. Import the image to your library by File > Import > Import to library. Then select the image to import in the library.

Drag the image from library to your stage area. Then, resize your stage area to the size of your image. To do this, click on the image and look at the properties panel which is found at the bottom by default.

Remember the width and height then resize your stage area.

Align your image by clicking on the image. And from the Align panel make sure you click first the To Stage icon, then Align Left Edge and Align Top Edge.

Rename Layer 1 to "picture". Then select the image so we can convert it to a movie clip. To convert to movie clip, click on Modify > Convert to Symbol or just simply press F8 from your keyboard. Name it to "pic1" and select Movie Clip for the Type. Then click OK

Then we need to edit the Movie clip, so double click on the movie clip or the image. You will see the Timeline change.

Select again the image and convert it again to another Movie clip and name it "pic2" by clicking again on F8.

Name the layer to "flash" and add 6 key frames by pressing F6 on your keyboard. Then go to frame 60 and hit F5 to expand the last frame. This layer will be our flash effect.

Select key frame 2, hit on the movie clip and go to the Filter tab along the properties panel. Click on the + button to add filter. Then select the Adjust Color. Then adjust the color accordingly. You can be as creative and dramatic, but for this statue of liberty, I have these settings.

Do the same thing on frame 4 and frame 6. Go back to Scene 1 and add a new layer. Name the layer to "lightning"

Select your Pencil tool, and set the stroke color and fill color to white. In the Fill color, set Alpha to 50%

Also make sure that the Pencil mode is in Ink.

Lock the picture layer and start drawing the lightning on the lightning layer

Using the Selection Tool, select the lightning you draw, and convert it to a Movie clip. Add the same key frames to the lightning movie clip like what we did on the picture movie clip.

But this time, instead of adjusting the colors, we need to draw different stroke of lightning on each key frame. So start with key frame 2, delete the original pencil stroke, and draw a different one up to key frame 5. Just leave key frame 6 and delete the one on key frame 7 because the lightning ends there.