Animation for Idiots

[treefrog]

I'm trying to find ways of showing basic scientific concepts to kids in school using an interactive whiteboard and Promethean ACTIVstudio2. I've got some great ideas for simple animations to show how things work but I've never done any animation before. Can anyone recommend an easy-to-use animation package that will allow me to make simple GIFs/flash-style animations and that won't cost the earth?

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

gimp can make gifs and it's free

but i dunno about easy to use (all you have to do is create lots of layers and have a slightly diffrent image on eatch and the save as gif)

 

[little_legs]

Bump!

I would love it if someone could make a recommendation for a product/software that will enable a pea brain to create .gif images.

At the moment I am using Instagiffer which is slow and does not offer a lot of editing options. I am predominately interested in something that's relatively easy to use and at the same time is able to quickly convert animation to Tumblr's 2MB limit.

Is there, perhaps, an Adobe extension that covers animation?

Thanks.

 

[Buddy Bradley]

You want to make animated gifs? You can do it with Photoshop, I think, or there are several online tools. If you want to make clips from films into animated gifs, you probably want to look for screen capture software for whatever platform you're on.