Round 4!
I made a pendulum animation to practice some overlapping and breaking of joints. While doing so I came to painful realization that there is no sensible way to build a hierarchy of pieces/joints/parts in Flash. I had to animate the top, then the first joint, then the second, etc. If you need to make an alteration to the top then you need to redo everything below it.
I'm guessing you could animate each part as it's own movieClip then build the hierarchy there, but then you can't view it in realtime. It's tricky! Fun stuff though so far...this one didn't come out perfect because I don't have the patience to go back and make alterations when it's already keyed on 1's almost the whole way.
http://www.jaygrenier.com/animation/fla ... ndulum.htm