Basic Actionscript & Interactivity

You need buttons to create an object for your users to click on. The button consists of four states which you will learn about in this tutorial: Up, Over, Down, and Hit.

Both the graphic symbol and the movie clip symbol have their own timelines. Unlike a graphic symbol, the movie clip symbol will play independently of the main timeline. For example, if you create an animation of a bird moving its wings within a movie clip symbol, and then put that bird in the main timeline, the wings will continue to move even if that main timeline stops.

You can combine movie clilp symbols with buttons to create an interesting effect as seen in this tutorial. Basically, you would want to place a movie clip symbol on the 'Over' keyframe within your button editing mode.

Masking has many different uses and can give you some interesting animation effects. This tutorial will show you how to create a basic mask and add animation to it.

This is a very important tutorial. It will show you the basics of creating a fully functional site where the user can click on a button and the timeline jumps to a different frame. The tutorial references a sample file which you can download right here: workingsite.fla

This tutorial simply shows you an example design and layout - more artistic - with some animated masking.

An invisible button in Flash is basically a 'hot spot' - it makes an area of your screen active so your visitor can click on it.

Flash does not make use of the standard browser scrollbars. If you want to insert large paragraphs of text you will need a scrolling text box. This tutorial takes you through a simple pre-built example. The file you can use to work with is right here: scrollbar.fla

And here is a sample fla that includes a link to an outside web site if you ever need to use that: navigate to URL

Flash CS4 has some very interesting and handy motion presets bult-in which you will see in this tutorial. If you are using version CS3 you will not have this feature. These can come in handy if you need a quick and simple motion tween animation.