The Book of GIMP

6.2 Building an Animated GIF by Hand

At the beginning of this chapter, we built an animation frame by frame as layers in one image. Here is a general list of the steps to use as a guide for building similar animations:

Figure 6-13. The Frames to Image dialog

1. Create a stationary background for the animation.

2. Create another layer with the object that will move; it may be cut from a photograph, drawn using paint tools, or typed in as text.

3. For each new position of the object, duplicate the preceding layer and apply some transformation to the new layer: Move, rotate, or deform the object, zoom in or out, and so on. Take care when doing this, or the animation ...