Best way to achieve fade out-in pages

Question

I was wondering if anyone had an opinion on the best way to
build this --
I want to have some kind of lovely transition between the
pages of my website (why not; it's Flash) -- I've thought about the
following three options:
- old page's text flying off the right side while the new
text flies in the right
- old page's text fades out and a background animation (like
a turning page or something) plays before new text fades in
- old page's text simply fades out as new page's text fades
in
In all of them I ran into a problem -- how to tell two or
more sequential things to happen on a button press. For instance,
if there was some kind of nifty flying-away of the old page's
content, how do I tell it to do that and THEN fly-in the new page's
content? It would be a pain to simply animate every possibility,
like page a to page b, page a to c, a to d, b to a, b to c, etc...
there has to be some way to script it prettily.
I've come across the following ideas:
quote:
on (release) {
myClip.gotoAndPlay("fadeout"+pagename);
outerClip.gotoAndPlay(1);
Where you define a 'pagename' variable for each one and have
frames labeled accordingly
or:
quote:
button02.onrelease = function() {
movieclip01.fade(0,10);
movieclip02.fade(100,10);
movieclip03.fade(0,10);
//etc, etc, etc....
where you clumsily fade out everything else possible when you
load each one.
or I was even thinking about making the old page content
'retreating' animation for each page and trying to code it to play
that and then play the requested new page, in one long timeline.
Does anyone have a more elegant way of thinking about this?
I've looked all over for examples, but most tutorials seem to stop
short of the scripting I'd love to use. Code examples would be
highly, highly appreciated. I'm a total AS3 newbie, but willing to
learn if that's the best way.
Thanks in advance to all the brilliant people out there who
might add their 2¢!

Answer 1

Thanks again NedWebs! For this thought experiment, I'm just
talking about a simple fadeout current clip - fadein new clip. But
I run into the same general question lots of times, for instance
for a current project I wanted to unload the clip, play a 'page
flip' looking transition movie, and then load in the new clip...
So are you advocating the button action as being fade out all
other movie clips (as a catch all that works no matter which is
loaded), then load requested movie clip?
How do you tell the actionscript to finish fading out 'a'
BEFORE starting to fade in 'b'? Or in the pageflip example, how do
you tell it to complete the whole fadeout, THEN play the pageflip
movie, THEN load the requested clip? If I put the actions within
the same handler or whatever, won't the instructions complete all
at once?
Sorry for my tangly questions; I'm learning!