Beginner help - controlling the attributes of movieclips through another

programming flash
1

Hello,

I have a beginner question, apologies for rusty language and incorrect references.

I have 3 movie clips on the stage. Their identifiers are ‘dim’, ‘bright’ and ‘source’.

What I want to happen is when the user clicks on the ‘dim’ movie clip, the alpha of the movieclip ‘source’ is set to 20. So I tried to write the following:

onClipEvent(mouseDown)
{
_root.source._alpha=20;
}

But this does have no affect. I thought it was a problem with the syntax. But when I do:

onClipEvent(mouseDown)
{
this._alpha=20;
}

The alpha of the movie clip itself goes down to 20.

Does this mean:

  1. That I cannot use the events on one movie clip to control the attributes of another?
  2. Something wrong with the syntax?
  3. Or is it done in an entirely different manner.

Please do help,
Thank you,
Gopaldass