New to Flash, Trying to Play a MC

[Zooch]

Hi all,

Just picked up flash a couple days ago and went through a beginner video tutorial. I learned how to create symbols and edit their properties (for the most part) as well as creating shape and motion tweens.

This is all good until I realize I can't do anything but make crappy, clunky blocks and circles change colors and re-size and turn into random letters. I feel a long way from developing the website that needs finished in 2 weeks.

Anyways, what I'm trying to accomplish today is to get a button to start a movie clip. To paint a clearer picture, I'm trying to take a square (with text thrown on it) and make it so when the viewer clicks on the rectangle, another larger rectangle appears above it, displaying information.

Okay, It's a "Contact Us!" button. I want a larger rectangle to "grow" from the bottom left corner and "materialize" (from clear to black), then once finished animating, display our contact information (links included).

Thanks in advance for reading - look forward to your responses!

Zach

PS -- I'm not a programmer. I've looked into ActionScript 3.0 and I'm about 90% confused. I understand the basics like what variables and functions are, but I have no concept of the proper grammar and library knowledge to understand all the lingo. However, if you throw some code in a reply, I can copy+paste like a champ.

[Sonichusky]

add this code to the movie clip/button:

on(release){_root.gotoAndPlay(--Frame goes here--);}

replace "--Frame goes here--" with the number of the frame that the movie starts on.

once you click and release on the movie clip/button, it will play from the designated frame.

EDIT: woops, didnt read all of your post. make a movie clip of the info box appearing or whatever it does. on the frame that you want it to stop, click on the frame and put in this code:

stop();

now you should have a movie that appears in a cool fashion and stops, displaying information. make sure that the first frame shows it is invisible and that the frame has the stop(); code. move this finished product onto the main field and give it the instance name "infobox". to give it an instance name, look at the properties tab and find the instance name field. now put this code into the button:

on(release){_root.infobox.gotoAndPlay(2);}

this tells it:

on(release)-----click on, then release...

{_root.infobox.-----the instance name of the movie you want to do something with...

gotoAndPlay(2);}-----starts playing the movie on the second frame.

hope that helped =]