Using Masks for an Iris Effect

Yet another of the many uses for Flash’s masks is the iris effect: mimicking the iris diaphragm of a camera by closing in and out of a scene with a black obscuring layer. We’ll just need a couple of layers and shapes to create this effect, so start off by creating a base layer with the shape/scene/image that you want to iris in/out on. I’ve just used a default stock image from Flash’s sample library.