About creating motion and interactivity

Flash provides a variety of ways for you to easily add motion and interactivity to your documents, to create a compelling user experience. For example, you can make visual elements, such as text, graphics, buttons, or movie clips, move or disappear; you can link to another URL; and you can load another document or movie clip into the current document. The following features allow you to add motion and interactivity:

Timeline effects are prebuilt animations that you can apply to text, graphics, bitmaps, and buttons, to add motion to visual elements with a minimum of effort. See Using Timeline effects.

Tweened and frame-by-frame animation is motion that you create by placing graphics on frames in the Timeline. In tweened animation, you create the beginning and ending frames of the animation, and Flash creates the intermediary frames. In frame-by-frame animation, you create graphics for each frame in the animation. See Tweened animation and Frame-by-frame animation.

Behaviors are prewritten ActionScript scripts that you add to an object to control that object. Behaviors enable you to add the power, control, and flexibility of ActionScript coding to your document without having to create the ActionScript code yourself. You can use behaviors to control movie clips and video and sound files. See these sections:

• Controlling instances with behaviors.
• Controlling video playback using behaviors.
• Controlling sound playback using behaviors.
• In screen-based documents, you can use behaviors to control screens. See Creating controls and transitions for screens with behaviors (Flash Professional only).

Note: You can use ActionScript to create more complex or customized interactivity. See ActionScript Basics.