I bet most of you fancy in creating a cool animated avatar or signature....okay here just a few steps that I believe anybody can try and complete it in just about 15 minutes. What you need is just a Paint Shop Pro software...any ahem ahem PSP will do....just make sure it has Animation Shop.

1.) First of all what you need is a movie clip. You can try Apple - Movie Trailer and choose anything that you fancy. In this tutorial I have chosen a clip from King Kong

2.) Play the footage and pause to the scene that you want as your animated GIF, using screen capture from PSP....capture that scene. Okay play the footage again and quickly pause again to capture another scene
Repeat play & pause until you got something like 25 screen frames or less. It don't have to be a very long clips....you're creating a short movie clip for your avatar not an epic

These are my screen capture of King Kong


3.) Save all your screen frames into your hard disk.

4. ) Run Animation Shop in PSP, just follow the default setting and click next a few times....until you see the menu add image. Okay add all the screen footage that you have saved earlier. Click finish.

5.) Now lets view your work. From the menu click View >>> Animation. You can adjust your clip to make it run faster or slower. Just right click your screen footage and choose Properties >>> In Display time ( 1/100th of sec : ) change the figure inside. 20 being the default .... 10 or less will make your clip run at a fast speed. 30 or more and it will be a bit jerky. But you can do trial and error on your own to get the best animation.
REMEMBER : if you decide to change the speed....you have to change ALL the frames to make it run smoothly.

6. Lastly, go to save as an save you work...and make sure to save it in CompuServe Graphics Interchange ( GIF )

That it....all done....

Here now is my King Kong animated GIF :



and another one from Kung Fu Hustle :

As a fyi, WinDVD 7 has a feature to save movie clips into Animated GIF format. Quite cool, tho' the file sizes can be HUGE (I think it saves it at 15 fps).