How do you create them?

You need a gif animation program - the one I use is made by Ulead and has no special advantages except that I found it very cheaply in a discount software place a few years ago. There are dozens of them, and they all work much the same; you create a series of images (like the frames of a cine film) and set the time lapse between them, and any special effects e.g. a fade. The program then creates any intermediate images that are needed, e.g. in a fade from one image to the next, and packages them together as an animated .gif file.

Ulead keeps the file size down by eliminating any pixels that are duplicated in colour from one frame to the next, so that if (for example) only a quarter of the image changes, it only needs to keep the data for that quarter in that image. you can also reduce the file size by restricting the colour palette - .gif can handle a maximum of 256 colours, but a lot of the animated gifs you see are 64 colours or less.

The way to get it to work without producing huge files is to use the smallest possible number of colours, frames and effects you can get away with. For example, this one (for a CSI / Buffy crossover series I write) is about 48k, which means it can be used as a Livejournal icon, but to get it that size I had to reduce it to 32 colours (I think) and avoid all effects other than successive pictures.



The way this one works is that I started out with the pictures - first the six full-sized ones, in turn, followed by a series of quarter pictures overlaying the last picture of Catherine Willows, then a series of images with the letters added one at a time. Each had to be created as a separate image to start with.

The actual frames were
1: Buffy - timing about .25 seconds between frames
2: Grissom
3: Dawn
4: Warwick
5: Willow
6: Catherine
7: Catherine with Faith superimposed on the top LH corner
8: The above picture with Greg added to the top RH corner
9-14: Adding successive characters overlaying the old picture
15: The picture above with "S" added
16-25: the rest of the letters added with a very small time delay between letters.
Pause of about .2 second then loop back to the first picture.

Hope this helps.

Forgot to add that there are several free gif animation programs. This site has a couple for Windows, though I haven't tested them:

http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/horizon/6013/graphics.html

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 & Jasc Animation Shop 3 (I don't think you can actually find it anymore, it's a pretty old programm) are the programms that I use (I know that they are pretty expensive, but this is the 21st century, we have limewire! )

Flash is very professional style and you can go for all kinds of cool effects, and Animation Shop is a little simpler (but it does have standard effects like fade in, fade out, old movie effect etc)

A few of the graphics programs come with animation programs. Animation Shop comes with Paint Shop Pro, and Image Ready comes with Photoshop if that helps.

~Anna

I think that the JASC program is the one that's now part of Paintshop Pro. A lot of sites won't let you use flash icons / animation, .gif tends to be more universally acceptable.

With Flash you can also save your animations as .gif files (although you cannot put sound etc into the file, but who would want that for an avatar )