The Flash Symbol 101 Series

These simple exercises will walk you through the basic principles of working with Flash symbols.
They form the basis of 90% of what you can do with Flash as an Animator.
For programmers – turn all the symbols in these exercises to Movie Clips, and you’ll get a great head start too.

The 3 skills you MUST get a good grip on are:

Converting an object to a symbol
Navigating in and out of Flash symbols – and their respective timelines
Understand the difference between creating a new instance vs. duplicating a symbol.

Once you REALLY GET these 3 things – learning the rest will be easy.

List of exercises:

Exercise 1: Create a new Flash Symbol
Exercise 2: Convert to Symbol + Break Apart
Exercise 3: Create Multiple Instances + Distribute to Layers
Exercise 4: Transform instances + color effects
Exercise 5: Edit Symbol + Navigate in and out of symbols
Exercise 6: Nested Symbols: Sun animation
Exercise 7: Duplicate Symbol + Swap Symbols

For an in-depth discussion of what a symbol is, the 3 types of symbols, and working with them as an animator (and not as a programmer), please read this article about The Flash Symbol.
Also, browse this Flash FAQ for Animators to find answers to typical problems.

OK, let’s get our hands dirty:

Pre-flight Checklist:

Open a new document. Any version of Flash will do.
Just to form a good habit, set the document to 25 fps (frame per second).
Make sure the following windows are open (if not, check them in the “Window” menu):