Chapter 10. Controlling Animation

Ordinarily, Flash assumes you want to play your animation in sequential order from the first frame on your Timeline to the last. But sometimes start-at-the-beginning-and-quit-at-the-end isn't exactly what you want. Fortunately, by using a combination of scenes, frame labels, and ActionScript (Chapter 9), you can control your animation virtually any way you like.

For example, say you're putting together an instructional animation. You want to start with an introductory section, move on to the meat of your topic, and then wrap up with a question-and-answer section. If you organize these sections into separately named scenes, then you can play with the order of your animation quickly and easily. If you decide to reposition the question-and-answer scene directly after the introduction as a kind of pretest, for example, you can do that with a simple drag of your mouse. You can even add buttons someone can click to replay the question-and-answer scene over and over, as many times as she likes.

In this chapter, you see how to create both frame-and object-based ActionScript actions to make the most common types of nonsequential playback effects, including looping ( replaying a section of your animation over and over again) and reversing (playing a section of your animation backwards ). To make these effects easy to test, you'll also see how to add interactive buttons to your animations. Finally, this chapter describes how to control the overall speed at which Flash plays your animation on your audience's computers.