Better late than never... As I promised earlier, I uploaded the complete Flash and ActionScript source for Venetianization. It is, potentially, a framework for simple yet very powerful and accurate music visualization movies. Effects can be programmed for a set of elements and issued at nearly exact points in time. The complete source (Flash CS3, ActionScript 3) can be downloaded here: venetianization.zip

A few word about the inner workings of this: As you saw in my demo project, you work on an 2D array of circles. You basically animate these circles through 3 layers of definitions:

• Selections - which of the circles to animate
• Actions - what to do with them
• Sequence - when to issue them

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I completed my first real Flash project last week. It's an animation for a musical piece and it's called Venetianization (long load times, be patient). One of the goals of this project was of course to learn Flash, which however I still don't know how to use. Instead I learned ActionScript 3. So, there is not a single element on the stage; everything is scripted. And to my own surprise, I quite like ActionScript.

ActionScript 3 is the embedded scripting language of Flash 9 and a complete rewrite of its previous versions. I only had a short look into ActionScript 2 and did some simple stuff with ActionScript 1 at work aeons ago, so I can't tell you exactly what changed. But I can tell you that ActionScript 3 is really clean and thoughtfully designed. It takes the very flexible nature of ECMAScript (Javascript) but adds lots of instruments to organize and structure your code more strictly. You are not forced to use those, but you'll help yourself greatly if you do so.

Of course there are also some (many) things that don't work as good as they are supposed to. Most of them, I believe, are to blame on Flash itself, rather than ActionScript.

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