Interactive Background

Interactive Backgrounds

This tutorial helps you to create simple interactivity into your Flash movies with an interactive background. You draw, import, scan etc. suitable backgrounds into your movie, and the user chooses which one they want to look at.

Setting up the Flash Movie

The first thing to do is set up the Flash movie so that it displays how we want it to. For this tutorial, I used a width and height of 200 pixels (px) and a 20 frames per second (fps). You need to set these up so that they suit your movie.

Creating a new Movie Clip

Before you get down to drawing/importing your backgrounds, you need to create a movie clip to put them in. Click on the Insert >> New Symbol menus (or press CTRL and F8 / CMD and F8). Type in backgrounds MC for the name and Movie Clip for the behaviour and press OK. Insert a new layer on the backgrounds MC movie clip that you just made and call it Labels. Insert a blank Keyframe on both layers at frames 10, 20, 30 and 40 by pressing F6. For each of the keyframes, enter the following script in the Labels layer to stop the movie:

stop()

Bring up the Frame panel by pressing CTRL and F / CMD and F and give the frames the following labels:
Frame 1: BG1
Frame 10: BG2
Frame 20: BG3
Frame 30: BG4

Time to get Drawing!

Now is the time that you can start to draw your backgrounds, they can be anything you want, even another Movie Clip. Draw the first in the empty layer of the backgrounds MC in frame 1. the second in frame 10, third in frame 20 and fourth in frame 30 (you can add more if you want). what you should end up with is shown below.