Flash Assignment Progress

A day has passed. Still here with my TypeError problem. Because of this, I can't progress with the assignment.  It's looking as if I might have to start the whole project over again and repeat the processes from a fresh slate, which would make it the fourth or fifth time I've done so. Although I won't have to change anything so I won't have to redo all my Printscreens but it's not something I would want to be doing again with the time ever so quickly decreasing.

Tomorrow, I hope to have sorted out this TypeError problem by any means necessary, even if it means restarting the project and redoing all the components. I also hope to be working on the Site Content and at least make some in roads in the Application base. I'm undecided as to whether make it within the Site's SWF file or make a new flash file with the family tree application and then embed it in. It kind of defeats the purpose of developing natively in Flash but then it also makes for easier debugging between the two if a problem persists. I'll think about it if I get to that point tomorrow.

What I was thinking about today though was my Introduction Clip. My idea was to have something reveal as if it's being drawn on the screen in real time, like a circle or something. Once the item is fully visible, it'd glow and return back to it's original state. A name would then appear next to this object, retract and then reveal the Site or Application name, with the object now acting as a User Clickable Door to access the site. Once it's clicked, the door opens and zooms to a white page, in which another movie clip shows a transition of the background colour change from White to Blue. That's the general idea of what I'm trying to achieve. for the start of the website. I'll admit, it does seem a bit over the top and it might become time consuming, but if it works, it'll be pretty sweet.
I got around to making the Introduction clip of the reveal using a mask layer. What I should of done is make the mask a rectangle, which decreases in height to reveal the shape. Instead, I used a circle. Bad choice.

The object I'm trying to reveal isn't a standard shape like a square or a circle. It's an outline of a cartoon tree. There are points in which one part might be a near straight line and another might have a really big curve which interfers with that. Take the diagram below as an example:

-----------
|             |
|             |
|             |
|________|___) <--- Reveal starts from here and goes clockwise

What do you suppose the problem will be if you try to get a rotating half circle to reveal a shape like that? Some parts of the image will reveal before others do, which is excatly what happened with my shape. Instead of removing the circles and replacing them with transforming rectangles, I decided to skew the shape of the circles during the rotating tween effect. It works, to an extent, but it's a lot of tedious work to keep creating keyframes and skewing the circles at each frame so the reveal doesn't look messy or glitchy. If I have to start over, I'll surely use Rectangles instead.

Till then, back to debugging.