AJ'S CATZ

Chloe's Animation Project

Step 1

First step is to choose two or more pictures of your Catz. The best kinds are those which suggest movement, such as playing with their toys or other activities. Chloe has selected seven shots of herself showing off her acrobatics.

Next, adjust the images to the same size. If these are captures from your Catz program, the images are in BMP form, and fit to the dimension of the Catz. Determine what the largest width and height is from all the images and round those numbers up. Out of Chloe's seven images, the widest image was 128 pixels, and the tallest was 207 pixels. We rounded these numbers to get the dimensions 130 x 210.

Using Paint Shop Pro's "Add Borders" function under the "Image" pull-down menu, you can add pixels to the top, bottom, left, or right of your images, adding the area necessary to make the images a uniform size, or you can make a blank image in the final size and paste the image into the blank image.

If you intend to make the animation with a transparent background (so your web page background can be seen behind your Catz), you will need to fill the color of the Catz background with a color that is not actively used in any of the images. As Chloe is a white Catz with black and grey highlights, we used a bright blue for the background.

When you fill the background, you might find that your Catz' eyeballs also fill with the new background color. This is due to the color around the eyes not being completely solid. Undo the fill, and use the eye color (generally black) to finish the area around the eyes. Use your zoom to find the open areas around your Catz' eyes.

Finally, save the images using the *.gif format. Due to how animation works, you will have to use the interlaced 89a format. Do NOT save any transparency information at this time (this can be adjusted under "Options" in the "Save As" dialogue box).

The finished results might look something like this:

leap1.gif leap2.gif leap3.gif leap4.gif
leap5.gif leap6.gif leap7.gif

* Continue the project
* Return to animation project
* Return to AJ's Catz

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Lisa D. Jenkins / ajscatz@bigfoot.com