To help us with our projects we completed a tutorial on an expanding Flash banner in AS3. Here be a link.
During this we used masking and frame labels. Both of which I have never really used beforehand. We also had to use DreamWeaver to fondle with some HTML to display it.
This is the hot spot which triggers the animation (Which is a tween) to play. Essentially when you mouse over the hot spot it goes to and plays from a frame, it then does the same when you remove the mouse but to another frame, both the start of a tween making it look like a smooth animation.
