Transition between 2 external swf's and main timeline(as2/cs3)

1

I’m working on a photography site. I have a main movie that loads external swfs into it. The main movie is broken down into a main city page (w/ a menu of 50 cities) and a specialty page (w/ another menu of 25 specialties), but only one is visible at one time. I have frame labels for each city and each specialty on the main timeline that will load in the page. What I’m tying to do is have a button link(a specific specialty page) on each city external swf that brings the user from the city page to a certain specialty page.

The problem is that the I first need to load in the transition animation that plays when the page goes from city to specialty then it needs to load in whatever specialty page the user clicked, but its on a whole separate timeline since their external swf’s. So basically it’s:

  1. click a city on main timeline, goes to frame label
  2. loads in external city page w/ photographer names
  3. click specialty link button for that photographer (I’m using MC’s as buttons)
  4. goes to frame label on main movie timeline and transition animation plays
  5. after that is done playing the transition, go to another frame label on same timeline that is for the specialty the user clicked
  6. loads in external swf of that specialty.

specCorp = mc variable/button
start2 = frame label that plays transition animation
fineartIN = loads in external specialty page

specCorp.onRelease = function() {
_root.gotoAndPlay(“start2”);
gotoAndPlay(“fineartIN”);
};

I know this isn’t right cause it’s only playing the first part of the AS. I think I need to make some variables for each city/specialty and somehow reference them to see what city/speciality link button was clicked so it will load that page. Another issue is that the main time line will load in a random speciality/city page when the swf starts, but I was figuring I could turn that off when linking between the two sections. I’m thinking it should go at the end of the transition animation and then call up all these variables, but would it remember what link button the user clicked on? Ok any help/suggestions would be great. Thank you.

Peter