# Lots of movieclips without instance names

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/lots-of-movieclips-without-instance-names/276957>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [December 5, 2008, 4:04pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/lots-of-movieclips-without-instance-names/276957 "2008-12-05T16:04:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![snooper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58f4c7/32.png) [@snooper](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/snooper)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2008, 4:04pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/lots-of-movieclips-without-instance-names/276957/1 "2008-12-05T16:04:00Z")

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I have a project where there are lots (50+) of movieclips of the same type on the stage at once. They are all positioned in specific places by hand.

What I want to do is have them all start out stopped, and then be able to, programmatically, start them one at a time at specific times.

Now the issue is that none of these clips have instance names at the moment. It would be sort of a pain to give them all instance names by hand.

Is there any way to reference these individually, as movieclips, via Actionscript?

I was thinking that I could go through the children of the stage object and find them all that way, but that doesn’t seem to be working correctly. It has been a long time since I used Flash/AS3 so I’m feeling a bit rusty.

So I guess to boil it down — how can I access objects on the stage without giving them an instance name and without creating them dynamically? Is it possible?

Thanks.