How to Animate a Flash Movie Clip

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By Adrien-Luc Sanders
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Animate a Flash Movie Clip

Animating a Flash movie clip is similar to animating on the main timeline but uses a separate timeline wholly self-contained inside the clip.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Step 1

Create a drawing on your stage, which will be animated inside your movie clip. Alternately, you can just start with an empty symbol and just draw inside that.
Step 2

Convert the drawing to a symbol (PC shortcut F8, or menu Insert->Convert to Symbol). Make sure to select the type "Movie Clip".
Step 3

Double-click on the symbol on the stage to edit it. You'll now have access to the symbol's timeline. Notice that everything else you have drawn on your main stage is greyed out and only the symbol's artwork is in full color; this is so you can tell what active elements you're working with on the movie clip's timeline.
Step 4

You can treat the movie clip's timeline as an entirely new stage. Animate using frame-by-frame animation, motion tweens or shape tweens, over as many frames as you want. If you want the movie clip to stop at the end rather than cycle, insert an ActionScripted stop on the last frame of the movie clip's timeline.
Step 5

When you're finished, click on the name of your main scene in the bar above the working area to return to your main stage.
Step 6

Although you've just been working with multiple frames inside the movie clip timeline, you'll see that the clip itself is contained within only one frame on the main stage. You can nest multiple movie clips inside each other, all with their own animation timelines that can be contained within a single frame on their parent timeline.

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