I’m on break this week. The break has given me some time to study up on matching Flash CS3 timeline development in the coding environment. It’s been interesting as we follow our two new media courses how common metaphors keep bubbling up and traversing across the spectrum.

Things inside things is a major structural idea, of course, and all the connotative language that follows: stacking, nesting, and genealogy.

One persistent issue that keeps trapping me is how to access objects in a complex display list via Actionscript. It seems a simple operation, such as pecking through to a child object: stage.parent.child (do something to child). This problem causes some amount of shifts to work flow as I’d like to place all animation function in one place or affect animations on specific deeper elements.

So we have father.child.addChild(rectArray[i]);

Accessing rectArray or something else bewilders me to affect a change to a nested element: rectArray[i].graphics.beginFill . . . I can affect groups easily but have a more difficult time conceptualizing interactions on deeper behaviors.

Oh, well. Back to work.