Continuous+Background

Hi. [: This is a mini tutorial for making a Continuous Background animation in Flash. This is just my way of doing this, so this isn't necessarily the correct way, or the easiest, it's just the way that I figured it out.

So first you'll want to pick an idea or theme to work around. I started with the sky and worked from there. (You could try grass, a field, a street, city scape, etc..) I took the rectangle tool and made it the size of the Stage and coloured it #32CCFF (blue).
 * Step 1**

Since I decided to do the sky, what do we see in the sky? Clouds. So create a new layer and begin drawing items that will be moving along the stage. (If you wanted to try this, I just took the oval tool, in white and made groups of overlapping ovals/circles in varying sizes) Just continue doing so. And don't just work in the stage, whatever you are making that will be continuous will have to extend into the workspace. You could make it move left, right, up or down, and just continue (in this case) the clouds accordingly.
 * Step 2**

Now, after working a bit out of the stage into the workspace, you'll want to select everything that you have, copy it, paste it and move it to the end of what you just created. First you'll have to pick a reference point of the starting image, and keep it level when you move it to the end. You could do this by pasting and holding down the arrow key in the desired direction until you reach the end, or using a guide line. (Guide line can be found when dragging your cursor from the ruler that can be seen at the top. Drop the line and it will be cyan coloured. Everything on the right of the blue stage is in the workspace. Now we have the "starting point" and the "same point"
 * Step 3**

For now, we are half way there. We have the background down, and we have the continuous objects down. Now we just need to animate it. If you are happy with what you have you can skip this step. For visuals and to create something more eye-catching you can add other features/objects. Again, since this is the sky, I added a bird.
 * Step 4** (Optional)

Now we can animate. So first of all, we will set our FPS. I have just left it as 24 which is standard. You can slow it down if you'd like, but I find for certain FPS, it seems laggy, choppy, and doesn't look good. But lowering the FPS certainly saves the number of frames. So you'll have to play around with how fast you want it to move. With staying at an FPS of 24, you'll need a lot to have it move slower, and fewer to move fast.
 * Step 5**

I've made my second key frame at around the 300th frame. (the first key frame being at 1) You can make yours wherever you'd like. Now with that frame selected, on the appropriate layer, we want to drag our //object that will be continuous// to the other end. Since we have two "starting points", in the second key frame we want the second "start point" to be in the stage.

In the time line, select the first key frame for the 'clouds' layer. Right click and select **Create Shape Tween**. This line will turn green with an arrow pointing to the next keyframe.
 * Step 6**

Press play.
 * Step 7**