I recently completed a really cool music video that called for mesmerizing backgrounds that moved to the beat of the music.

I did the whole video, including all of the effects in Flash. This was a relatively low-budget project, so there wasn’t as much time for me to create a pipeline between different software. Plus, I’m much less experienced creating visual effects, but I know Flash inside and out.

I’ll walk through how I created the pink and yellow tunnel effect. It was pretty quick and looks, in my opinion, way cooler than it should.

The following is aimed at those of you who have at least played around with Flash, and know how to create tweens, masks and symbols inside symbols. If you don’t know this stuff but want to know, feel free to get in touch! It’s not scary!

1) I first used the circle tool to make a bunch of concentric circles. I wasn’t crazy exact about it, because I just wasn’t. I filled them in one by one with darkening shades of pink, and got rid of the outlines.



2) I duplicated that layer and re-filled each circle with darkening shades of yellow.



3) I then put a circle-shaped mask on the yellow layer, and used a classic tween to make the mask grow, causing the yellow to appear to pulse up through the design, from the middle.

4) In the second half of the timeline, I put another pink design above the yellow one, and copied and pasted the same mask effect.

This resulted in the alternating pink and yellow, to the beat of the music.

5) I still felt like it needed something else. This is when the happy accident happened. Since I knew the circles weren’t perfectly embedded in each other, I thought that rotating that whole loop would make the circles vibrate a little bit.

I took the whole yellow/pink loop and nested it in another symbol. I then used a motion tween (the newer kind) with rotation added in.

That’s when this happened:

I did NOT predict that it would look so cool! It’s obvious now that it’s because my circles are so imperfect, and so not centered. Cool!

It looks 3D and mesmerizing and awesome and I never even left dumb ol’ Flash!*

I think you can do a lot of cool stuff in Flash, if you take advantage of its quirkiness in addition to the effects tools it does provide. Do you have any cool examples?



Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it in action yet:

*Flash, just kidding, I love you, you’re not dumb, please don’t crash today!

