Tutorials

Tutorial 4 - Create Personalised Flash e-card

See finished result here

Step 1
Create your animation as per usual. In our example we created a nice snowman.

Step 2
Draw a nice speech bubble or something to contain your text.

Step 3
Draw a text box and write a default message in it such as here is where your personalised message will be. Make sure it is big enough to contain the usual messages people would like.

Step 4
Change the name of the text box to something like mytext. Now that it is named we can use this name to identify the text box and change its text.

Step 5
When you embed the e-card in a webpage, to display different messages you change the name of the file, for example myecard.swf to myecard.swf?mytext=Merry Christmas to you. This will set the text box which we called 'mytext' with the Christmassy message.

Step 6
If you know a scripting language then you can take paramters from the URL and display the e-card differently depending on the message in the URL or a message from a database. The possibilities are endless!

*This example requires a version of Express Animator updated 1 Jan 2008 or later. So if your version is earlier download a newer copy from this website.