Creating Interactive Movies > Creating interactive movies overview

Creating interactive movies overview

In simple animation, Flash plays the scenes and frames of a movie sequentially. In an interactive movie, your audience uses the keyboard, the mouse, or both to jump to different parts of a movie, move objects, enter information in forms, and perform many other interactive operations.

You create interactive movies by setting up actions—sets of instructions written in ActionScript that run when a specific event occurs. The events that can trigger an action are either the playhead reaching a frame, or the user clicking a button or pressing keys on the keyboard.

You set up actions in the Actions panel for a button, a movie clip, or a frame. Using the Actions panel controls in Normal Mode, you can insert actions without having to write any ActionScript; if you're proficient in ActionScript, you can write your own script. Instructions can be in the form of a single action, such as instructing a movie to stop playing, or a series of actions, such as first evaluating a condition and then performing an action. Many actions require little programming experience to set up. Other actions require some familiarity with programming languages and are intended for advanced development; for information on creating advanced actions, see ActionScript Help.