Hour 15. Using ActionScript and Behaviors to Create Nonlinear Movies

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to put scripts in keyframes and on objects such as buttons

• How to edit ActionScript to make it do exactly what you want

• How to apply behaviors and modify them to suit your needs

Flash's programming language is called ActionScript. Like any programming language, ActionScript lets you write instructions that your movie will follow. Without ActionScript, your movie will play the same way every time. If you want the user to be able to stop and start the movie, for example, you need ActionScript. In addition, Flash includes behaviors which are snippets of ActionScript that you can add without needing to know all the details behind the code. It turns out that, even with behaviors, you can do much more if you invest just a little bit of time learning ActionScript. Last hour you learned how to create buttons. This hour you'll learn how to attach ActionScript to those buttons so that something happens when the user clicks a button.

The topic of scripting is very deep. We won't cover it all this hour. Rather, we'll cover the basic concept as well as look at typical applications for scripting. This way, you'll build a good foundation on which to grow at your own pace.