Text Animations

This document tells how to make stupid little text animations with GIMP. People asked me to translate the stuff I wrote for a digital media course to English, so here it is.

[Animated logo]

The logo reads "Principles of Digital Media, animated by Weyfour WWWWolf".

Please note that I don't recommend GIF format images for animations, mostly because GIF format is patent-burdened and compresses badly compared to PNG. You probably should create static images for the page and make animations like this in Macromedia Flash or something... Yes, Flash sort of sucks, but terabyteful animated GIFs suck even more... =) In this Digital Media course, though, GIF requirement was "written in stone" (though I guess it would have been negotiable). I just hope there would be wider support for MNG or something...

Anyway, this shows two text effects: The letter-by-letter appearance and fading text.

The letter-by-letter text was created thus (algorithm thing, maybe this should be scripted somehow or something...)

Make a new image.
Add text to a new layer.
Copy text n times - where n is the length of text in characters.
Select bottom layer, select everything.
Clear selection.
While not done:
- Move to above layer
- Unselect next letter.
- Clear selection.

The fade was simple, too. Simply n copies of faded layer (where n is the number of steps in which we do the fade), and then each layer (frame number s should have transparency t defined as t = (s / n).

Sorry, if I got too mathematical - I suck at math, though - but this will hopefully explain it. I use Octave to calculate things.

Suppose that we have 6 frames (like in our example):

octave> n = 6, s = [1:n], t = (s / n)
n = 6
s =

  1  2  3  4  5  6

t =

  0.16667  0.33333  0.50000  0.66667  0.83333  1.00000

And here's the same sequence of transparency stuff for 10 frames:

octave> n = 10, s = [1:n], t = (s / n)
n = 10
s =

   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10

t =

 Columns 1 through 8:

  0.10000  0.20000  0.30000  0.40000  0.50000  0.60000  0.70000  0.80000

 Columns 9 and 10:

  0.90000  1.00000

See? Even a tame monkey could figure this stuff out! Go Forth And Make A Masterpiece In Text Fading!

(Sorry... Too much coffee this night...)

(In case you were wondering about the file name, let's just say that this file was created late in the night... Same excuse for the meta tags... =)

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Last modified: Fri Dec 8 00:33:27 EET 2000