ANIMATION ON THE INTERNET

Your first moving 'GIF'

The first thing you will need to learn and understand is that:
“There is no such thing as an animated 'GIF'.

The word animated is used as a process of the movement in the English language. What really happens to our “animated GIF’s” is a series of 'pictures' are placed into a program (The Animator) and it will reveal each layer in sequence so the eyes believe there is movement. The 'GIF' itself does not move. Keep this in mind when learning – it’s not a moving 'GIF' it is a lot of 'GIF’s' one after the other, appearing to move, like a "Flip" - "Flick Book" we used as kids for showing pictures of a moving object to our friends. Usually these were stick figures, whose arms and legs were moved, and a facial expression changing. Individual drawings - 1 per page, page after page with a simple change here and there till we created all the movement we needed in the book, then we flick the pages.

A Tip: Never change the format you have straight away on your picture to a 'GIF' format. Do all the alterations to properties first to keep clarity.

Usually any picture in most any format (BMP, TIFF, PSP, WMF,) can be converted to a GIF before you start your animating. Starting with a flat object of your choosing, the only limit in animation is restricted by the time you put into it. Anything can be animated.

Things to consider first before working in animation:

1. What you want to animate.
2. The pixel size of your final 'Gif'.
3. Color reduction.
4. The overall size of your 'Gif' in bytes.

Lets talk about each of these items.

Item #1 What to animate:

You can create a figure walking across the screen, a logo flashing, a home page name/banner changing colors, a tree with falling leaves, lights turning off and on in the house, etc. You do not have to use a single item either, you can use a photograph, your family portrait or something you drew on Paint Shop Pro.

Item #2 The size of your final 'Gif':

The maximum (accepted) size for animation on the Internet is 200 x 200 pixels. Anything less is acceptable also. If the item(s) you want to animate are larger then this size, you will need to reduce them, by opening the picture, and re-sizing In Paint Shop Pro5, you would go to Image, (drop down list) click "re-size" then another box will open, click pixel size, Make sure that "Re-size all layers" and "Maintain aspect ration of 1 to 1 is checked. So, if you are re-sizing a 400 x 400 pixel picture, to 200 x 200 size, it will re-size correctly.

Item #3 Color reduction:

Once we have the picture adjusted (re-sized, colorized, brightened, moved, etc.) to what we want, we need to reduce the colors to 256, This helps in making the 'Gif'. Some of the animators on the net, believe in using a 216 color safe pallet to begin with for all colors. This eliminates extra bytes being created from the start.

Item #4 Overall size in bytes:

Try to stay under 50/60k (gif size) - This allows for faster screen showing, and takes less bandwidth. Most people will not stay and watch an animation without some other types of information being placed on the page for viewing, while the animation is loading up and getting ready to run. It is not recommended to have more then 180 Kbytes of any type of animation on any one page, it could cause browser difficulties. It is also suggested that sites with heavy graphics use thumb prints for graphics and/or still pictures for animation, with links to the item for individually viewing, as in the following site, the items are not being animated here, you can down load them for your own viewing if you want to. Tonguemonster's animation

It is highly recommended that you save your animation's in a File Folder call it "PSP ANIMATION ITEMS" or whatever you choose, in order not to cause confusion between an animated 'Gif' from other gif's you have saved on your hard drive.

Before you begin your Paint Shop Pro Lesson, if you do not have the Paint Shop Pro program already installed on your system, get your downloadable free trial program here: Paint Shop Pro 7 Click on Download Products: then Paint Shop Pro 7, Animation shop is included as part of the program.

Let's start with a "basic" animation, and continue to grow from there.

I have elected to separate parts of the lessons for the various Paint Shop Pro versions, some of these linked lessons maybe heavy in graphics, please allow load time for the images. I have tried to compress them to 256 colors while still trying to maintain clarity of the images. Once you have completed your section you maybe brought back together with other versions of the program, as the animation part of Paint Shop Pro is similar.

(NOTE: Versions that are converged into a single area will have this colored background).

PSP version 5, will have a pinkish background, Linked here ---> PSP 5 lessons
PSP version 6, will have a greenish background Linked here ---> PSP 6 lessons
PSP version 7 will have a bluish background. Linked here -----> PSP 7 lessons

So please click on the link above for your program and proceed from there.

NOTE: A proper Thank You needs to be addressed here because if it were not for the following organization's, and people this lesson would not have been created. Acknowledgment and Thank JASC, INC. for their making their Paint Shop Pro program's downloadable trial usage programs with an animation program attached and for their concise help files in creating animation. Thank You to Virtual University and it's VOLUNTEER STAFF for creating a wonderful, friendly, helpful environment for me to learn - the "How to Do's" - on the world wide web. I hope that this forum can survive with many more lessons and wonderful "VOLUNTEER" instructor's helping other Computer and Internet users to continue to grow and expand their knowledge. I have learned a lot from a person who posts on the animation binary newsgroup and wish to give him credit here also. Thanks Just - Bob for explaining a lot of what an animation is and how it works on the Internet, most of the beginning how to's are from him. I also wish to say Thank You to my classmates for your understanding when you are doing this lesson. Yes, there probably are errors in these tutorials and I know you will help me to create a good working lesson that we all can be proud of doing. Okay enough of the legalities, and on with the fun.