Lag between layouts

I have spent almost 2 hours search the forums because I was certain many people before me have experienced lag when switching between layouts (specifically to a layout with full screen sprite animations that take up a lot of memory)...and I found a lot of stuff on custom loading screens and linking layouts in the event sheet...but nothing that will specifically let me load the sprite assets for one layout when say the main menu is loaded...so that when you load the next layout it doesn't lag for 5-10 seconds.

Basically I have a fairly large Level Selection Sprite object on my "level selection" layout with multiple animations associated with it. I need either a way to include those assets in memory on load of the main menu so that it goes straight to the level selection layout with no lag or I need a way to show a loading screen between the main menu and the level selection menu so the player doesn't think the game locked.

Any ideas, suggestions or re-routs to forum posts I missed on the topic would be greatly appreciated.

Not 2 minutes after I posted this I figured out at least one way to do it...

In the event sheet for the main menu in my "on start of layout" event I added an action of create object (the name of my sprite) followed by an action to set visible (with invisible selected).

I had already added a "include event sheet" (via right click in a open are of the main menu event) that may also be required but I havent tested removing it yet.

Hope that helps someone.