Flash® Professional CS5 Bible

Chapter 16. Building Timelines and Interactions

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Working with Movie Clips

• Using targets and paths

• Exploring absolute and relative paths

• Using dot syntax

• Controlling animated sequences with ActionScript

Unlike most multimedia authoring applications, Flash has the capability to use multiple simultaneous timelines in its movies. So far, most of the examples in this book have only one timeline. You've seen how to add basic actions to your movies to make them interactive. Now you begin exploring the world of multiple movie timelines by using the Movie Clip symbol.

A Brief History of Movie Clips: The Key to Self-Contained Playback

A powerful piece to the Flash movie format is the Movie Clip symbol, introduced in Flash Player 3. Movie Clips enable Flash developers to create complex behaviors by nesting self-contained sequences of animation or interactivity inside each other. These sequences can then be placed as discrete, self-playing modules on the Main Timeline (that is, Scene 1). Initially, the key to the power of Movie Clips was their capability to communicate with and control each other via the tellTarget action.

In Flash Player 4, the role of Movie Clips was expanded — they could be used with ActionScript. That capability put Movie Clips at the foundation of advanced interactivity in Flash. In Flash Player 5, when ActionScript matured into a full-blown scripting language that mirrored JavaScript, Movie Clips became the central object of programming. In Flash Player 6, Movie ...