Creating an Animated Hidden Menu System - Page 4

OK! Did you make it? I hope so. Now we'll proceed by creating the navigation menu in a Movie Clip. Remember, Movie Clips are independent timelines. They are not constrained by other timelines within your Flash movie. I feel this is a major stumbling block and sometimes hard for people to grasp but it's an important concept to understand. We'll build this layer by layer. Let's get into it!

1. Create a new Movie Clip symbol and name it Navigation.
2. With the symbol open for editing rename the first layer to actions & Labels.You'll be using this layer for actions and labels relevant to the entire timeline. (I like to make my work as easy to interpret as possible. Six months from now if I have to revisit the project or I want to use a portion of a project for something else, I want to be able to identify key areas of my work and be able to put myself right back into that same mode of thought that I was in before. I don't want to waste valuable time searching layers and keyframes for key items that made my creations work. This is especially valuable in a environment where someone else could be picking up your work at a later date or using it in their projects!)