You need to know actionscripting, and there are plenty of books on the subject. Also I recommend saving your files as exe, with the swf content as flash 5, as most people havent upgraded to 7, much less 8. You can open the actions screen in flash using the f9 key. I usually make a seperate layer for all my event actions, and apply triggers using containers and objects instead of on particular instance. Its alot cleaner and you can change things around without reinventing the wheel. There are some good beginner tutorials on www.actionscript.org and www.flashkit.com.
I know it's quite a daunting task learning actionscript, and a flash movie will take atleast a month for a good 30secs-1 min of animation. The one I did for this site took about 3 months, and the one Im working on now will take about that long as well, so dont get discouraged. Oh and remeber a preloader because there is nothing worse than getting halfway through and having a stall, especially when the .puppetSound object will keep playing.