A new “WOW! This is fun!” activity.  As you readers know, I love working with images.  I have enjoyed editing photos using Picasa collages and Photoshop Elements, and making images ”come alive” with pop-up cards and stop-action animation.  Now I discovered something that combines images, editing, movement and the fascination of seeing the immediate results on my computer screen.  

It’s called Web Animation, and the free download to create these little wonders is called GIFfun.  A GIF is a type of image, similar to JPEG.  Here’s what I did this morning to make my first animated GIF:

The Kite

(1)    I put an image of a boy flying a red kite on my desktop.

(2)    I dragged that image to Photoshop Elements and changed the color of the kite to blue, and saved it to the desktop.

(3)     The same as above but I changed the kite’s  color to yellow.

(4)    I opened the GIFfun application that I had downloaded from the Internet.

(5)    I dragged each of the three images into the GIFfun window, set the delay     time for each image, set the number of loops to “Forever,” and then clicked on “Make Gif.”
(6)    Immediately I saw my animated GIF working.  I then dragged that image to the desktop, gave it a name, and, VOILA! —  my first creation was ready.

(7)    I then dragged the created animated image into “compose” Gmail, and sent it to myself for a test run.   

It was wild!  I enjoyed seeing those kite colors keep changing: red, blue, yellow, red, etc.  I was off and running to create 2 more animated GIFS.  Moses parted the Red Sea — using just 2 images – the sea together and the sea parted.  Next, a funny fish ate a rather lengthy horseradish — using 6 images, with different lengths of that horseradish next to the fish’s mouth.

So what does it say?  Pop-ups for that 3D effect, and animated GIFs for that motion effect.  Am I no longer satisfied with those plain old photos, those “old static images”?  Maybe it says that my peripatetic nature — and my high metabolism — require that I keep my eyeballs moving.  We live in a 3D world, so why not make images come alive?  I can’t wait for home computer hologram-making software!  

Can I attach an animated GIF to my essays?  Hmmm.  Stay tuned.

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen@hotmail.com