Naming

Naming movies is essential for interactive animations you may decide to create in the future. Naming the movie clips you create helps to "Target" the movies you may wish to add an action to. The first step, is to create the movie clip.

1. First, launch your Flash application. You should be familiar with knowing how to add a movie clip to your movies. Click on Insert > New Symbol from the Flash toolbar. You may name the movie anything you want, and click OK. For this example, I'm going to call it "flash". Note: This isn't the naming procedure you are about to learn.
    
2. Once you have pressed OK, you should see another timeline very similar to the the main timeline. Except this time you're editing all the frames inside the instance which is the movie. You may add what ever you wish in the movie. I'm just going to add a circle in there. Once you have drawn what you like, click on the Scene 1 icon on the top left. See image below:

3. You should now be at the main timeline, and nothing should be inside your main timeline. Now, you drag your movie that you created into the Scene 1 location. Press Ctrl + L (or go to Window > Library). You should see your movie located there. Simply drag and drop the movie onto your main timeline. See image below of the Library:

4. Once you dragged the movie clip to your main timeline, simply right click on the movie on the timeline and choose "Panels". From the Window that pops up, choose Instance. See image below:

5. You should see a window similar to the image below. In the box for name, give it any name that will help you to remember the movie better. For this example, I'm going to give it the name "kirupa". See image below:

That's all there is to naming movie clips in a Flash 5 animation. This naming procedure isn't necessary for beginning animations, but once you start to explore the world of "Tell Targets" , "Drag Movie Clip", and more, this information will come in really handy. Also, if you still are having problems, please download the source code for this file by clicking here.

I hope the information helped. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to post them on the kirupa.com Forums. Just post your question and I, or our friendly forum helpers, will help answer it.

The following is a list of related tutorial and help resources that you may find useful:

How to use the Forums New, Upcoming, and In-Progress Tutorials How to Help out kirupa.com Writing Tutorials

Cheers! Kirupa Chinnathambi kirupaBlog | twitter

Flash Transition Effects

Flash Effect Tutorials