synchronizing multiple flash animations

I am a newcomer to Flash, and want to add three flash animations to my site.

These animations are supposed to occur in a certain sequence. However, because the three files are different sizes, they all take different amounts of time to download.

The events are never sychronzied properly. Is there a way for me to load the images, but not start them, so they can all be started at once?

Sounds like you need to preload each animation - you can do this by inserting >new scene into each movie (.fla) file before the animation, and putting a preloader into the first 10 frames. There's tonnes of preloaders on places like www.flashkit.com if you need to learn how to build one - basically it loads all the images and sounds in your flash movie before playing the main movie.

As for actually getting them to play together, you could do 1 of 2 things: 1: Set each preloader to work for a set time, say 1 minute, so that everything is loaded in each movie and they all start after 1 minute (you can change the time according to how big the files are, e.g. 20 seconds), or (slightly more difficult) 2: pass on information between the movies using variables. But I'm not really sure how you could do this one, maybe some body else would know. Personally I'd do 1.

HTH