Tell Target/Load Movie Scripting in Flash

by Don Herion

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Click to see the final project - Fordstone.swf

One of the problems Flash designers confront when creating complex animations is the sheer size of the final product. If there were a way to create several Shockwave files and have them accessible by one compact Shockwave file, you could have faster loading animations and greater flexibility. For example, you could build a Shockwave interface for a Real Estate Web site that links to dozens of Shockwave files on individual properties. As the portfolio of properties change it would be easy to add a new button to the interface and drop a new Shockwave file into a folder. Flash makes this fast and painless if you use the 'Load Movie' and 'Tell Target' script actions.

Fordstone Automobiles Goes Online
For this tutorial I created a Web site for fictional automobile company announcing the release of it's car models for the year 64,230,210 BC. For this project I worked on the 'Flintrock Coupe' model only. As you will see this is inspired by the famous 60s cartoon series.

Frame 1 of Fordstone_Cars.swf

The 'Fordstone_Cars.swf' file is a 10 frame animation with 'Stop' actions at frames 1, 5 and 10. I also added a 'Frame Label' named '5' on FRAME 5.

Layout for 'Fordstone_Cars.swf'