Tell me about Adobe Flash CS3

I'll compose a fuller list of the exact things I'd like to know later, but at the moment, my biggest concern is this: How do you convert an animated piece into a symbol?

Here's an example of what I need:

Say I'm animating a spaceship flying through space (...which I AM). I animate the flames that come out of the exhaust on a separate layer. Now I want to move my ship around the stage...say, using a motion tween. But when I do, the exhaust animation stays right where it is. Moving each frame of that animation to follow the ship would be a pain in the ass. Therefore, is there a way to convert the animation itself into a symbol that will move with the ship?

I know there has to be something. A long time ago, I watched a friend animating in Flash, and he was just pulling random animations out of a library and plopping them in the appropriate spots like it was nothing. HALP.

And before you say "Google is your friend", let me just say: A) no, it's NOT, B) the "Help" section in Flash is really no help at all and C) I'm not about to read through 300 pages in my Flash textbook to find what I need...plus, I can't find my textbook at the moment, anyway.

Unfortunately I don't currently have flash installed on this machine, only my work laptop :3 Anyways... without being able to get into too much detail iirc when doing animations like these it's best to start off with making the whole object into a symbol, that is, never animate stuff like that through the layers on the main timeline.

As far as I remember you can convert something to a symbol using either F8.. or right clicking on the object and choose "convert to symbol". I'm not really sure if this is what you're after really, and I can't remember how you'd do this with something that's already animated. Maybe copy the frames from the main timeline into the symbols timeline?

1. Cut the frames of the animation
2. Create a new symbol and give it an appropriate name
3. Paste the frames while inside the new symbol

EDIT:
I re-read your post. What you could do is have symbols for the spaceship and 'exhaust flames'. Next, place both the spaceship and 'exhaust flames' symbols inside another symbol and move that newly created symbol around the stage.

If you need clarification, just ask.

^Yep, that about did it. Muchas gracias.

I'm sure there'll be more questions to come, so stick around...

So in my Flash class we've been going over ActionScript for a couple weeks now, but my teacher, it seems, is so incompetent that I always leave the classroom feeling like I learned absolutely nothing about it. The ActionScript section in my textbook is, of course, glossed over and unhelpful...like "Oh, you wanna know more? Well buy the textbook for ActionScript, shithead!"

So really, I've not got much to work with, except for a single script for a play button that I ganked from someone's (strangely specific) "How to make a play button in Flash" tutorial. Huh...

Specifically, I'm working with Flash CS3, and thus am also working with ActionScript 3.0. Honestly, I really don't know the first thing about ActionScript syntax. I just wanna be able to cut-and-paste most crap for my scripts.

What I want to know in particular is what kind of scripts I would need to use in order to make a simple interactive movie, which is what I'm going for in regards to a final project. Like, for example, a movie that starts off with Joe walking down the street and bumping into his friend Bob. Bob asks Joe a question, and a box pops up with three possible responses, yadda-yadda, click one to progress the story in one direction, click another to progress it in another direction, and so on.

So I suppose key script types I'd need to know are the following:

-The script that would cause the movie to come to a standstill (or just loop a predetermined range of frames) whenever it's time for Joe to make a choice.

-The script that would make the buttons clickable, as well as the script that transfers you to another scene after clicking.

-I already know how to make a 'play movie' button, but it seems the scripting fundamentals are entirely different when making a 'replay' button...so I'd need to know that as well.