Flash for Beginners
By John Reuben

Hello and welcome. Did you see an interesting animation on the internet the other day, and discovered that it was done using Macromedia Flash?. You have the program installed on your machine and now you are trying to figure out how to get things moving. The good news is that you are in the right spot. Here you will see and learn how to create basic Flash animations.

Assuming that you have already gone through the lessons that come along with the Flash 5 program, I will explain how to create the effect shown above. Watch for the catch phrase typed in bold at the end. Make sure you write it down.

Draw a circle and convert it into a button symbol. Inside the button symbol make a new layer and draw the cross as show above. Make it into a symbol. Copy the cross symbol in the over state and animate it over 10 frames. In the main time line type out the text that you want to display when clicked. Convert it into a movie clip and give it a name. Make a new actions layer and choose:

setProperty ("/movieclip name", _visible, "0");

Now give some action to the button:

on (release) {
setProperty ("/movieclip name", _visible, "1");
}

Try it out. E-mail me if you get stuck some where.
Whatever you do in Flash make sure to keep your file size as small as possible.

More Examples
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