Animated Flash-Only Thumbnail Gallery I

No doubt you’ve seen a thousand static thumbnail galleries, created in HTML, DHTML, Javascript, Flash, or a dozen other ways. Increasingly popular, though, are thumbnail galleries with an animated interactive element, such as the video thumbnail slideshows visible on YouTube after you finish watching a video. You can created animated thumbnail galleries quite easily; let’s create one in which the thumbnails expand to give a larger preview when they’re moused over, then shrink when the mouse leaves their area.

Start off by creating a new Flash document and either importing the graphical elements of your GUI into it, or creating a layout there. I made a messy one here (then cleaned it up later for the final version).