help with color transformation - What am I not getting?

[sauros1]

Brand new to AS3 and I can't seem to understand the process of programmatically changing a movieclip's alpha and color offset values. Keep in mind that these are movie clips that I created in the design stage. I understand the Displaylist but my movieclips in the display list have names different from the instance names I gave them, which seems kind of pointless. I'm sure this is easy to do, but my poor understanding of the terminology is getting in the way. Please help!