if you've ever worked in adobe photo shop or adobe illustrator you're
probably familiar with the concept of a mask
a mask is basically
cutting a hole
in some things so that you can only see
what's underneath it through that hole
in a sense
uh... it works a little bit differently in flash
and you can have to see what's happening with it before you can understand
what it's doing so right now what i want to have happen in this animation
is as the flashlight moves over
i want to reveal
the owl and the star and the moon
and before we can do that let's go ahead and take look at what what's happening
on each one of these layers
so the flashlight layer if I turn it on and off it's just a flashlight symbol
and it has a motion tween and it goes down
and at the fiftieth frame
it comes back up
and then we have an owl layer and that includes the stars and the moon as well
and then a simple background layer
now if i turn the flashlight into a mask what it's going to is it's going to
wherever the flash light originally was
it's going to be like a hole it's gonna
hide everything else that's a part of that mask
and we're only going to see all that content when this part of the flashlight
moves over him so let's see what how to do that
i can right click on this layer
and change it to a mask
and it automatically moved the owl
under that mask you can see these little icons here to the left of the layer
name
that show that this is a mask and then this is a masked
item
and if it doesn't turn into a masked item you can right click on it and
go down to the very bottom or
let's say it looks like this is a regular owl I can drag it underneath that masked
layer and it turns it into a mask item
so here's the problem
first of all if i don't have those layers locked
it doesn't look like
it did anything at all a mask will only show up if you have those layers locked
but we're still seeing a problem because i no longer see my flashlight
but watch what happens
as it moves over the owl you can see it's like
a hole
that we can see through
to see the owl that's a masked item
so we're kind of there
the problem becomes we still want to see the flashlight
so were going to actually make a duplicate of the flash light layer
so go ahead and take that layer and drag it down to the new layer icon
and now we have a flashlight copying
and I'm gonna right click in unmask that because we just want that to be a normal
flashlight
so we'll mark those masked layers
and we have a problem
it we can see the flashlight now but we can no longer see the mask
so here's the tricky thing you actually wanna have this copy underneath the mask and the
masked items
so I'll move it down and make sure it's not a masked item
and now when we're over here
we can see
both the cut through or the whole
to the content where we're seeing the owl
but we can also see the flashlight behind it
so that's what we wanted to have happen with that
masked layer
you don't always need
two copies
but it's a good idea to understand how that works so that you can play with it to
get it to where you want it to be
so again a couple things to reiterate
first pay attention to what each of your layers looks like
if I make this a little bit bigger
and double click on this layer oops
this is where you can go to layer properties and you can see that this one
is a mask layer
and if I double click on this one
this one is a masked layer
and if I double click on this one
this is just a normal layer
and that's what we want to have happen you can tell visually by these little icons
to the left of the layer name
and then also if your mask isn't working
try to rearrange the order of it
with one exception the mask always is on the top in the masked items
should always be underneath it
and make sure that the layers are locked
because if they're not locked again it's gonna look like nothing happened