General Animation
What exactly is animation?
figure 2.1
Animation implies movement of some kind. But even a flashing image, such as the red/green button in figure 2.1 could be considered an animation. For our purposes we'll consider any multi-frame image an animation.
Figure 2.1 was constructed in Photoshop with Kai's Power Tools used to add the two spheres. Two spheres? Yep. By having both a green and a red sphere and simply saving the two separate images and then combining them with an animation program I got a flashing button. This image could just as easily have been created with PSP and some of the techniques I describe in the PSP tutorials. The spheres may not have been so sophisticated, but the idea would have been the same.
Of course, some movement can take place in an animated image without the entire image, or all of the objects contained within it having to move. Figure 2.2 is a draft of an image that was intended for a children's science web site.
figure 2.2
To continue work on this image I would have animated the bubbles and added some dimension to the beaker. This draft was created quickly (to save time and money) to give the art director of the project some idea of what the finished animation would be like. I used Corel DRAW! to design the beaker and used Alien Skin's flame filter to add three separate flames. By saving each of the three iterations as separate GIFs and combining them with an animation program I produced the image in figure 2.2.
At least part of my point here is that there are many different types of animation. Most are created in much the same way as the two you see above. The most important part of the design process is to come up with an idea and then create the separate frames.
Animation can mean flashing, partial movement, shrinking and growing, movement in any, or each, of the three dimensions, spinning, etc...
In our next animated GIF tutorial I'll demonstrate step-by-step how you can
create an animated spinning globe.
That's it.