When developing in Flash we often find ourselves developing straight code based animations as well as time-line animations.  And when creating the time-line based animations we often find ourselves wishing to play the animation in reverse in certain occasions.

Unfortunately Flash does not have reverse capability built in, Yes it has the prevFrame() method which could be used with the onEnterFrame() event to play in reverse but this method is not as straightforward as a developer would wish and is easily prone to bugs do to the amount of state checking.

Luckily for us developers that use a Tweening library such as TweenLite and TweenMax (available at greensock.com ) provides us an easy to use interface for playing our animations forward and reverse to any desired location. To accomplish this we use the Frame and FrameLabel plugins. These plugins allow us to tween to a desired frame or labeled frame respectively.

A quick example of how to use is:

TweenLite.to( moviclip, 1, { frame:40 } );
TweenLite.to( movieclip, 1.5, { frameLabel:"intro" } );