How to make a cool fire effect behind your text

I hope you all know how much I love you.  I just wrote this entire post, and lost the whole thing, and now I’m starting over. Well, we are releasing a new trailer soon and it has this cool animation in it.  I thought I would take the time to show you how it’s done.  You start off by making some clouds in GIMP.  I know Photoshop is the industry standard for professional digital art, but trust me, this is easier in GIMP.  Start with a blank 256 x 256 file.  And make the cloud textures with this option:

When you have a cloud texture, give its layer an alpha mask, and select “grayscale copy of the layer” to create the mask.

 

Then–and make sure you’re not editing the mask–fill the layer with white.  It should now look like this:

 

 

Save that as a png file.  Do that three times with similar but different patterns.  Import them all into Flash.  Take one of your cloud textures and put a bunch of copies onto the stage to cover it and then some.  It should be white on white, and therefore impossible to see.  I put a black rectangle on the layer below so you can see what it looks like, but don’t do that to yours. Turn all of those tiling clouds into a single symbol and delete the symbol off the stage.

Save all of those tiled clouds as a symbol, then delete it off the stage.  Repeat for your other two textures so you have three tiling cloud symbols, but nothing on the stage.  Now make a new symbol, and drop each one of your cloud symbols on its own layer.  Make a layer on the bottom and fill it with a big orange rectangle.  Make a layer between two of your cloud layers and fill it with a big yellow rectangle.  Turn the yellow rectangle into a symbol and copy it onto another layer between your other two cloud layers.  What we’re going to do now is this: Be sure you make the layers move in multiples of 256 so that you have smooth looping.  Adjust the opacity of the smoke layer and change its blending mode to multiply.  Adjust the opacity of the yellow symbols and set their blending to multiply also.  Label the first frame “Start.”  Add a keyframe to the last frame and give it this one line of code:  gotoAndPlay(“Start”); And now your flame layer is done.  Now you just need to add a mask over it.

Back on the stage, add a black layer on the bottom.  Put your flame layer over that.  And over that make another layer, and put any shape you want on it (I’m using the Himeko Sutori logo) and turn it into a symbol.  Use that layer as a mask layer to your flames.  Animate the symbol on the mask layer however you want.

Congratulations!  You’re done.  Let me know in the comments below if you end up using this for anything.  I’d love to see your work.