Author: Andrew Spear | Website: http://www.etheory.co.nz

The Good Stuff

Now you know some of the basics of calculating distances and making movies react in relation to them. So now it is your turn to use these concepts to come up with some crazy interaction of your own. Firstly, to make this script really practical you will need to have it inside its own move. Use the "cut frames" command to move both frames of all three layers into a new movie clip. This movie can then be placed anywhere, even animated within your movie somewhere and it will always look at the cursor. A similar script you could apply would be to detect the distance from the cursor to the movie. This will open up many more options for you to experiment with. Using the earlier, triangle shaped diagram, the length of the angled line is the distance between the cursor and the eye. We will call this "c". Again, going back to high school maths: c squared = a squared + b squared. So to calculate the distance c we can use something like this:

c = Math.sqrt(a*a+b*b)

I will leave the rest for you to sort out, have fun and come up with something crazy. Visit our website - www.etheory.co.nz - for more examples and tutorials. At the time of writing, the main navigation on the site uses a complex version of the above scripts to create an organic type of interactive animation, check it out when you can.

If you have any questions or comments about this tutorial, feel free to email me or post to the tutorial Comments page here at Flash Kit.