Beginning ActionScript 2.0

Chapter 7. Controlling Movie Clips

Macromedia Flash gives you an incredible number of creative opportunities, and the movie clip is the digital canvas for your ideas. Regardless of whether you are interested in creating animations that treat the senses, games that entertain, or applications that help with productivity, mastering the movie clip is the key to exercising your creativity.

With Macromedia Flash, you can create your projects by manually piecing them together in the timeline, by creating a project entirely from script, or through a mixture of code and manual assembly on the timeline. There is no one right way to do it, just the way that best fits your needs.

This chapter teaches you a number of techniques to get you well on your way to mastering movie clips. You learn how to create movie clips on-the-fly, how to load external content, how to pull content to the stage from different sources, and how to manipulate content once it is there. You also take a look at how to use movie clips as masks, and learn about some performance issues surrounding movie clips.

The Movie Clip Revealed

You have already learned the three types of symbols that you can work with: graphic, button, and movie clip. The graphic symbol is used for holding media that does not require its own timeline. It cannot be controlled with ActionScript, so its usefulness for coding is very limited. The button clip can be controlled with script, but it is primarily just a source for events, and can be controlled only ...