Animated .Gif Process, [ironing out kinks]

Facing some problems when creating the animated .gifs, [which is the third stage in producing the eventual Flash animation]. The process is to initially create a collage in Photoshop, then through use of filters and warp effects, distort the original collage through a series of stages, which act as the image source for each of the individual frames in the animated .gif.

When enough frames have been created, [bearing in mind that the initial distortion might only be half of the effect, as it is necessary to create the reverse and gradually return the image back to its original state], I import them into Adobe Fireworks, and place each one in a separate "state", which is the individual frame of the eventual animation.

Below is a screenshot of the Adobe Fireworks workspace. If you look over to the right, you can see a panel labelled "states". This was taken at the end of the building of the animated .gif. Originally there is only one state, but as you paste in each image, you click a button to create a new state, and import the next image. Eventually all the images are saved within one single file, and displayed one after the other, which gives the effect of animation. An animated .gif file is very much like the digital equivalent of a "flick-book".