Creating an empty movie clip

To create a new, empty movie clip instance on the Stage, use the createEmptyMovieClip() method of the MovieClip class. This method creates a movie clip as a child of the clip that calls the method. The registration point for a newly created empty movie clip is the upper-left corner.

For example, the following code creates a new child movie clip named new_mc at a depth of 10 in the movie clip named parent_mc:

parent_mc.createEmptyMovieClip("new_mc", 10);

The following code creates a new movie clip named canvas_mc on the root timeline of the SWF file in which the script is run, and then activates loadMovie() to load an external JPEG file into itself:

this.createEmptyMovieClip("canvas_mc", 10);
canvas_mc.loadMovie("http://www.helpexamples.com/flash/images/image1.jpg");

As shown in the following example, you can load the image2.jpg image into a movie clip and use the MovieClip.onPress() method to make the image act like a button. Loading an image using loadMovie() replaces the movie clip with the image but doesn't give you access to movie clip methods. To get access to movie clip methods, you must create an empty parent movie clip and a container child movie clip. Load the image into the container and place the event handler on the parent movie clip.

// Creates a parent movie clip to hold the container.
this.createEmptyMovieClip("my_mc", 0);

// Creates a child movie clip inside of "my_mc".
// This is the movie clip the image will replace.
my_mc.createEmptyMovieClip("container_mc",99);

// Use MovieClipLoader to load the image.
var my_mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
my_mcl.loadClip("http://www.helpexamples.com/flash/images/image2.jpg", my_mc.container_mc);

// Put event handler on the my_mc parent movie clip.
my_mc.onPress = function():Void {
    trace("It works");
};

For more information, see createEmptyMovieClip (MovieClip.createEmptyMovieClip method) in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.

For a sample source file, animation.fla, that creates and removes numerous movie clips at runtime, see the Flash Samples page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples. Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the ActionScript2.0/Animation folder to access the sample.