How do you expect to generate a revenue - when you (in a sense) are paying for the broadcast time. You would have to have a product to sell, as in the infomercial approach where they also pay for their airtime. The alternative way (and more appropriate to animation) is toy product. In the eighties it was all the rage with the saturday morning cartoons - production budgets came from the toy companies, and they paid the networks to broadcast their content - because they knew in turn that it would sell toys. So the question comes down to - just how are you proposing to generate revenue. The other (somewhat weaker option) is thinking that this method of distribution will get you a word of mouth reaction where someone may hire you for a job. If that is the target I would sincerely say avoid doing the broadcast angle, find another means of distribution.

Well there are a couple of ways to action this environment. The first (and most simplest) is to use the 'hittest' function. You basically attach a movie clip to the mouse, and then when you have the on (mousedown) it checks the hittest to see if it connects with the object - you could either have it list all the movie clips on the stage and check each one, or put the movie clip names all into an array and then create a loop that checks them all. However what will happen with this way is that you only allow them to move if they don't click on an object. The second and FAR more complicated way is to use pathfinding metholodology, and here's where it gets a bit complicated. What you basically need to do is turn your stage into a grid, of tiny square, and then put your objects into movie clips and dynamically attach them to the stage, and push that into an array - at the same time you reference another array with a single variable which tells whether the user can move to this square or not for example - a 9 x 9 grid below: 000000001 000000001 000000001 000001111 110000000 110000000 000011000 000011000 000000000 The ones would identify what squares the user can't move to. Then what we do is initialise a variable to declare where the user is. When they click on the square the movie clips tells it where in the grid that is and whether the user can move to it, if not you tell it to move to the nearest square. That's a very simple way, if you wanted to work in a more complicated but cleaner image (like Diablo II) do a search for pathfinding.

I would suggest rendering them uncompressed from max, and then apply your codec in Premiere, means that if the animation starts getting blocky from the codec you don't have to re-render again. Depending on your exact content there are a various number of different codecs you can use. The main thing to remember is the data rate - don't make it too high or the cd drive won't be able to keep up. Director can handle both movs and avis with ease, so it'll just be a matter of experimenting with different codecs to find the right look - there is no quick and easy solution for codecs - it just requires a lot of experimentation.

There are a couple of ways you can export to vhs, and going through Premiere is a good start. I've produced a lot of linear cel animation in Flash and then exported to avi, then brought into Premiere and exported out to VHS tape. Here are a couple of urls that may be of assistance. http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/how/expert/flashontv/ http://www.flickerlab.com/flashtovideo/ If you have any further questions after that, feel free to ask.