Animation

A clever content tool if used correctly, that can add interest to any webpage.

Considerations:

  1. Some graphics need to have similar color backgrounds in order to blend.
  2. A graphic image should have some relationship with the content or it is unnecessary fluff.
  3. Like a Christmas tree ornament, the graphic image should compliment, not dominate the contents where it's located.

Tutorials used:

Custom animations require art skills and tedius planning. First look to the internet for free libraries of animated gifs. Also look to low cost gif libraries that contain 1,000's of decco gif's to choose from. Then if you need to make a custom graphic.

GO FOR IT!

Just added

Using A movie editor, I recently captured a sequence of still photos, imported them to Gimp as layers and then cropped and scaled all photos and then published it as an animated gif.

Animation

An animated picture, a scrolling banner or any object with changing content can grab the viewer's attention and add visual interest to a web page. Overuse of animation can cause distraction and even be annoying.

Animation Samples

The first 4-animations were done with Gimp 2.6 using the Litebox plugin:

1. crude bounce, 2. better bounce, and 3. best bounce are my first three animations. 1-crude bounce was done quickly and each frame drawn with the mouse. 2 & 3 were spheres made in corel draw, with gradient shading and then copied & pasted into each of the 12-frames at an appropriate location. 3-best bounce animation distorts the ball on impact with the virtual floor.

animated gif animated gif animated gif

walking egg healy spin garys home room

Of these last 3-animations, the walking egg was my greatest challenge to make. The drawing contains a yellow 3-D egg (drawn in corel) and then pasted into each of 16-frames. A slight rise and fall of the egg along with the visible hip moving forward and backward, give the blue legs an appearance of walking. The last two animated gifs are from a 10-disc, 250,000 gif file set that I purchased 7-years ago. The gymnastic animation represents a 'how-to-do' graphic while the flashing sign calls for attention. I chose to make this one a link back to the home page.

River Jumps Circle

So well behaved and easy to style and display.