A very easy way to explain Animation is to remember the way that cartoons are made, each movement is a new cell, in animation it is the same thing each movement is a new FRAME. To make the animation work you have to put these frames together and run them quickly, this is what Animation Shop does, it puts the frames together and animates our static images.

Start by opening this tube, or choose one of your own in Animation Shop. As you see this opens a new animation, it is automatically called Animation1. At the bottom of the image are some letters and numbers, F:1 D:10 what this means is Frame #1 and Display Time is 10. We will discuss these later in this lesson.

This is what your first frame will look like. We are going to duplicate this frame. Clicking inside the image will "Select" the image, there will be a blue border around your selected image. Go to Edit / Duplicate Selected, now looking at our image you will see that we now have a second frame. The numbers at the bottom will look like this

F:2 D:10 meaning you are looking at Frame #2 and Display time 10. Selecting this frame go to Animation / Mirror. Now our #2 Frame looks like this.

We now have two frames which you can view by scrolling the bar below the frame. Or we can produce a film strip by Going to View / Normal Viewing. This will show us both frames side by side . We can also preview the animation itself by going to View / Animation. Lets Do that now! Wow! She really is dancing fast! Too fast in my estimation she looks a little manic to me. LOL!

Click inside both frames while holding the Control key down and this will select both frames, then right click and go to Frame Properties, a new window will pop up and here is where we change the Display Time. Change it to 40. This means it will display each frame at 40/100th of a second. Now try previewing again. If you are satified with this you can now save your first Animation. Go to Save / Save as and name your animation and save as a .gif, this will bring up a one time optimization wizard which we will, for now, use the defaults, you can change this later if you choose. Once saved you should now have an animation that looks like this.