o.k. *deep breath*
I'll give you some conceptual stuff in regards to animation and gifs. Rember back when you used to (maybe you still do) draw little figures on the corners of a book, changing each page just a little bit each time. When you would flip the pages you would see the movement known as animation. You brought life to the pages.
Most animation programs use this same concept. To give you an example:
Each page in the book would be considered a "Frame". Most of the avatars I create are usally no more than 20 frames tops. Unless you have some Effects Templates, you have to manually edit each frame until you have the completed movie.
To do individual frames, make sure each image has the same Canvas size. Example, for avatars they cannot exceed 64x64 picels. Lets say you want the word "Viper" to move accross the screen from left to right, you would do the following:
Image one might look like this:"Viper"
Image two might look like this:........"Viper"
Image three might look like this:.............."Viper"
Image four might look like this:........................"Viper"
Once you have all your images created, then you can start dropping them into individual frames.
Example:
Image one would go into Frame one.
Image two would go into Frame two.
......so on and so forth.
When your all done - simply export your project as a animated gif image. This will give you the word "Viper" moving accross the screen from left to right. With this basic concept you can do a lot of different things like change the sizing of the words just a little each time.
Example: Starting in the middle of the screen with the word "Viper" with a small font size. With each additional frame, increase the size just a little. Keep doing this and you'll get an effect of zooming in on the word "Viper".
There are a lot of techniques, your only limitation is your patience and imagination.
I hope this helps. You should be able to find additional resources on the "How Too's" in reguard to the program your using in the on-line help that came with the downloaded program.
~later~
i hope this helps yall out.
