1) First, turn on Snap to Points and Snap to Guides. Lay out a horizontal and vertical guide so they intersect.

Now draw a constrained circle by positioning the cursor at the intersecting guides and hold Shift + Option (Alt) while you drag out the circle.

You can hide the guides for now.

2) Next, give the circle a Radial Gradient fill like shown above. Make the highlight off center to give the illusion of depth.

While the circle is still selected, Clone it.

3) Drag around the circles to select both. Then Blend them together. In the Inspector palette, set the Blend steps to 21. This will ensure that the sphere will appear on every frame of the animation later.

4) Create some new text so that it's centered within the Sphere shape.

Then convert this text to paths under the Text menu. While this text is still selected, Join it together as a composite path, then Clone it.

5) Move this clone to the left of the sphere. Activate the Transform palette. Turn off the Uniform option and in the x Scale, enter 5% like shown above.

While it's still selected, Clone it again.

6) Now move this new clone over the right of the sphere like shown above. We are now ready to Blend them together. But first, we need to fix the stacking order of the objects so they blend correctly.

7) Select the text on the left and Bring to Front, repeat for the text in the middle and right. The stacking order is now fixed and we are ready to create the blend.

8) Select all three text deices and Blend them together. You'll notice that it looks like a mess. Don't Worry. In the Inspector palette set the number of steps to 10.

9) While this blend is selected, go into the Xtras menu -> Animate -> Release to Layers. In FreeHand 9, you'll see the dialog shown above. Select Sequence as the animation type and turn on the option Use existing layers.

You should end up with about 21 new layers with all the steps on each one.

10) Now activate the Fisheye Lens options by double-clicking the Fisheye Lens tool in the Xtras palette. Set the Perspective amount to 100% Convex as shown above, then click OK.

11) Make the Guides visible if not already. With all the text shapes selected, position the cursor over the intersection of the guides. Holding Shift + Option (Alt), click and drag around all of the text then release. Watch the animation above to see it in action.

We've just set up the initial part of the animation, now let's create the shadow for the text.

12) While the text objects are still selected, Clone all of them. Keeping them selected, give them a Lens -> Darken fill with about a 30% darken amount.

13) Zooming in a little bit, you'll want to scale these Lens filled text objects so that the whole mass just fits within the Sphere shape. Above I carefully used the Scale tool to bring the size down.

When you get a size that looks good, send the whole bunch to Back. It's now safe to finally deselect that text. WOW, it's really starting to look like a mess, but we're almost finished.

Note: If you start experiencing slow redraw times, just work in Keyline mode.

14) You ready for the final steps?

Select the Sphere blend that we created back in step 3. Bring up the Release to Layers dialog shown above. Use the Sequence animation type, with the Use existing layers and Send to back options turned on.

This step takes that blend we created, and puts a copy of the sphere on every layer we've created up to this point.

Now we can see what this mess really looks like!

Now you can finish this animation up in one of two ways. If you have Flash 5, you can open this file directly and animate your layers as Keyframes.

Or you can just export the animation directly from FreeHand with the Flash Export as shown above. Just make sure that you turn the Animation option to Layers as shown above.

If you are using FreeHand 10, you can preview the animation under the Control menu by choosing the Test option.

If all worked, the final animation should look very much like above.

Isn't that great!

Note: You may notice that some of the letters don't warp very well. This seems to be a bug in FreeHand when you Blend some of these more complex Composite paths or Groups. Try using less text if you experience these problems.