In our first two lessons, you learned how to make a simple
Flash movie. By now, you should know how to make shapes move and how to
create a simple button. These basic elements are the bread and butter of
Flash, and you can do a lot with them.
But if you want to create complex, interactive animations, you'll need to push your Flash skills even further. In this
lesson, we'll concentrate on creating a fancy button that combines several
features. (It morphs! It moves! It makes noise!) So let's get started.
The tellTarget action is a pretty straightforward concept: It
tells another target symbol what to do. Actually making it
happen, on the other hand, is a little more complicated.
The coolest thing about tellTarget is that it allows nonlinear
interaction in your Flash movie. You can use it to start or stop a specific
animation or force a symbol to jump to a specific frame. For example, say
your movie is rolling. By using tellTarget, you can allow the user to turn a
soundtrack on or off at any point, independent of the animation that's
playing. Sound intriguing? Let's create this spontaneous soundtrack effect
right now.
First, we need two different symbols: a button for initiating actions
(the Tell part) and a Target symbol. Let's start with the Target symbol,
which will contain the soundtrack and indicate the status of a Play/Stop
button.
To begin, open the movie with the tween shape you created in the previous
lesson. With nothing selected, create a blank symbol by choosing New Symbol
from the Insert menu. Name it "Soundtrack." Before you click OK, assign the
Movie Clip behavior to this symbol. A Movie Clip symbol will play
independently of the movie that contains it, even if the movie has stopped,
which is just what we want for the soundtrack. Don't worry: If you ever
choose the wrong behavior, you can always redefine the symbol from the
Properties menu via the Library panel.
You should now see a blank Timeline that corresponds to the Soundtrack
symbol. But where's our sound? It looks as though we need to go get some!
Let's explore our options on the next page.
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