Looping Backgrounds

Ever wonder why the Flintstones seemed to live in a 5 ft x 300 ft stone tunnel? Ever wonder why Dino would pass the same mastodon lamp 4 or 5 times as he was running through the house? That feeling of architectural deja vu was brought to you by the looping background, a quick, economical technique to create the illusion of movement that animators have been using since the Silent Era.

A moving background gives the illusion of a camera "panning" across a space
(moving parallel to the picture plane.)

Any background can be dragged across the screen to create the illusion of a pan.
What makes the looping background special is that the pan can go on
forever and you'll never run out of background to pan over.

Feel free to hit the red STOP button when this gets too monotonous!

Creating a looping background in Flash is a breeze as long as you keep a couple of points in mind:

Make the art for the background exactly the size of your Flash movie's Stage width
(or height, if you're planning to pan up and down.)
Make sure one end of your background perfectly matches up with the other end
(you can use the grid to line everything up.)

Throw in a little tweening trick and you have a looping background!

Start Looping!