How to Create GIF Animations

This post is in response to Dave's request that enlighten the ALFA bloggers on how to make GIF animations.

Making animated GIFs is pretty simple, if you know anything at all about animating—or even if you don’t. If you have Photoshop you can use ImageReady to make animations, there is a palette available under the Window menu (at least that’s what it’s called on the Mac.) The process is damn simple. First create your frames in Photoshop or Image Ready (by duplicating layers you can, for example, move an arm or leg while keeping the rest of the body stationary; it’s also great for tweeking the image to make sure the movement is right by turning layers on and off). Alternately you can do individual drawings and scan them in. Then organize your individual cels in the palette and set the options for playback(speed, loop, etc.)— there might even be an option to export layers to the animation palette, but don’t quote me on that.

If you don’t have Photoshop/ImageReady there are a bunch of free programs on the net that create the same magic with varying degrees of sophistication. If you have Freehand and Flash you can make vector based animations, which can be very cool; but that’s a bit more complex, and not something I’ve spent a lot of time doing. Given that you ALFA artists do a lot of contours, cartoons and line drawings Freehand/Illustrator might be a good program to learn, but obviously they will never be as expressive as actually doing illustrations freehand (I drew the Happy Crab with Illustrator). The main advantage of knowing these programs is that they allow you to create resolution-independent vector graphics which have much smaller file sizes than bitmapped images, and can be blown up or reduced to any size without any loss of quality (great if you want to do billboards, silk-screens, prints, etc.)

A quick Google search for “GIF animations” netted dozens of tutorials, etc. so there are many ways to learn more. I look forward to seeing some results! Perhaps I’ll do one or two myself.