Symbols and Instances - Interactivity W/Movie Buttons

Hello,

I've been creating small scale animations for entry pages for years using mostly Freehand.

But now I've just started to design my first flash site. I designed the mockup in Freehand and at first everything was coming out right, meaning every animation I'd envisioned seemed easy to implement.

However I'm at the stage where I'm trying to have some interactivity with my portfolio. It's relatively simple really (comparted to some of the flash stuff I've seen).

I want people to click on the square which is mini image of the project, cropped. It rotates and then a full description of the project appears below.

I need some way to control how this happens. A close button on the detailed image or something. Right now I'm having trouble with the symbol. I assigned an action to the mini image and that action has been applied to the large image. I've tried renaming them but it seems all my editing goes directly to the symbol. Remember this is my first movie and I can't seem to think of or find out what I'm doing wrong.

Okay, attached is the section in question. The portfolio. Please take a look at the .fla and see if you can tell me all I'm doing wrong.

This is much appreciated.


Thanks!

hmmm... well looking at your piece (and how far along in your development you are).. i think it would be a good idea to rethink the structure of how you have things set up. You have all of your separate buttons, which is good (although, the on(release) method is usually only used on buttons, not movieclip buttons... i'm surprised it works honestly.. i would have thought that flash would throw errors... ) But, as it is, each individual section has it's own "content"(you have your big picture animation within the button). This is fine, but it will create the exact problems you describe, and the only way to fix this is with some sort of function. in pseudo code, it would look something like:

//---
possible buttons = button1, button2, button3, button4, button5 ...

function navigate(what got pressed)

loop through all of the possible 'got pressed'

if what got pressed == button1,2,3,4,5...

then set that button to animate the pressed state

otherwise, put whatever button that didn't get pressed to the off state
//---

and every time you press a button, it would pass that button press into your navigate function... this is a little complex though (especially for your first flash project)... an easier method would be to just place all of your content animations in one movieclip, and then tell the movieclip to go to that frame. take a look at the attached .fla to see what i mean

it takes a little actionscripting, but hopefully produces the effect you want.. write back with questions...

cheers,

bret

Thank you Brett for the tips. I'm going to work on them and see what I can come up with and let you know how it goes.

Brett,

Thanks again for the sample. I used it to create the type of buttons I needed.

As you might already know when you have any kind of design biz it's hard to work on your own stuff...so I had to abandon the little portfolio thing I was talking about in the initial post and instead had to work on my clients project. So here's the entry currently in progress but check out how I applied what you posted. I tweeked it a lil bit and now I know just enough to be dangerous

[link no longer available]

Let me know if you have any ideas on how I can make it better or whatever.

peace

sg