making animated gifs

[EricNoah]

Anyone have a recommendation for a free way to make a very simple animated gif?

The problem:

Our school district just voted a change of slogans. The new slogan is

"Committed to Children, Committed to Community, Committed to Excellence!"

I made the above gif many years ago, and frankly all I remember about the process was that it was a pain in the butt. There's got to be a way where I can make three images (the first phrase, the second phrase, and the third phrase, oh and I guess a blank placeholder) and then just click some buttons and tell it to fade from pic 1 to pic 2 to pic 3. Or maybe I'm way off base.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[mojo1701]

I usually use Adobe Image Ready that comes with Photoshop. It's simple enough to add transitions, but I don't know if you want to spend the money just for a .gif.

 

[Psionicist]

I can recommend GIF Movie Gear: http://www.gamani.com/gmgdown.htm , free for 30 days. It's very good when working with icons so I guess it must be good at GIF's too

 

[Agamon]

And then, of course, there is unFREEz, freeware, that works very well. It animated my homebrew world:

 

[trancejeremy]

I literally haven't used it in 10 years (I used it in the mid 90s back when I had a page about the paranormal to make an animated gif of the Kelly-Hopkinsville incident), but I used GIF Construction kit

http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gifcon.html

Back then it was shareware, with a time limit, not crippled. Dunno about the modern version. But it's $25, not that expensive, and it does seem to have the features you want, transitions between images and easy text banners

 

[Psionicist]

And then, of course, there is unFREEz, freeware, that works very well. It animated my homebrew world:

Nice, 19 kb! I love tiny applications.

 

[Agamon]

Nice, 19 kb! I love tiny applications.

Yeah, there's that too. Whoever heard of a 19 kb peice of software that does anything useful?