Exercise 9 – Wag the Tail

Learning Objectives:

Gain Experience with Animation Shop . . .

For this exercise we will utilize the Animation Wizard.  This is a very easy way to get started with animations and it works very well for the creation of Animated GIFs.  We will use the cat you created in the previous exercise and encourage him to wag his tail.  There are many possible ways to accomplish this.  One approach is shown below.

Preparing Graphics for Animation Frames . . .

1.  The vector graphic of the cat was saved in the psp format, this allowed for making changes in the tail's position.  Start PSP and then open the psp formated image of the cat.

2.  To facilitate a smaller file size the image was first resized to 20%.  Larger images create huge animation file sizes.  You need to choose the size that fits your need.

3.  The resized image was saved as "cat1a.gif".  The numbering system names for the files was chosen such that the numbers were the same as the frame numbers.

4.  The tail was now moved by editing the vector nodes in the tail to give it another position.  This was saved as "cat2a.gif".

5.  This process was continued until six different tail positions were obtained and saved into six separate gif files.

Using the Animation Wizard . . .

1.  From the file menu in PSP the "Run Animation Shop" command was chosen. 

2.  When the Animation Shop application opened the "Animation Wizard" command was selected from the file menu.

3.  The animation wizard walks you through all the necessary steps.  For beginning I recommend you just accept all of the suggested default settings.

4.  One of the last windows ask you to specify the images to be loaded as frames.  Select "Add Image" and browse your files to select the images you wish to use for the frames.  By holding down the shift key you can select all the images at one time, provided the are in a common folder.

5.  After the images are added to the list you can arrange them if the order is not correct.  After you click the finish button an image strip of your frames should appear.  The ones in this example are shown as they appeared below.

6.  You may now use the "view animation" tool button to see if the animation suits you.  If it is not how you desire it to look you can edit it at this time.  Choose Animation from the menu bar and then click on Frame Properties.  This allows you to change the display time for all of the frames.

7.  If you wish to alter the display time for an individual frame you may do so by merely right clicking on the frame itself and the choose the Properties command.

Saving Your Animated GIF . . .

1.  The procedure for saving your animation automatically finishes it for you.  The wizard is a powerful way to get started creating animations. 

2.  Use the File menu and choose the Save As command. Select a name and a folder to put the animation in.  Notice the different formats you can save it as.  For this exercise we saved it as a gif file.  The final result is given below.

 

This exercise and the material presented in the lesson has been an introduction to Animations only.  Animated GIFs are neat way to dress up e-mails.  You can also create slide shows of your favorite photographs and save the animation as either a GIF or an AVI format.  Did we achieve our learning objectives? They were...

Learning Objectives:

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Prepared 1/2/02
Revised 12/31/02
For Class Members use.
By: Dean Christensen