Animated GIF Making, whats your favorite way?

[BobTWC]

Being that I am new to this I would like to be able to make some animated gifs for posting, but I have no Idea where to start.

Could some of you guys share your favorite methods

Thanks

"hopes he put this in the right fourm"  

[TheYak]

I use GifAnimator 4.. I think it came free with some piece of software I got by Ulead.  I like it because I just load up all the images I wanna use as frames and then tweak it a bit.. it's quite simple.  

I'm sure there are better programs out there..  I know there's also a couple freeware utils that simple splice together a bunch of .gifs or .jpgs into an animated .gif or .avi file..  

I did this one w/ Gif Animator :

[oscar]

I use Animagic

[SSH]

A freind of mine (nudge nudge) is on day 234 of his 60-day trail of Animation Shop from JASC somehow. It never seems to stop working.

[jannar85]

I'm using Uleads GIF Animator

[Evil]

For basic stuff, like critics, I use unfreez. Its free hence the name unfreez. Its quite easy, but they all the frames have to be saved as .gifs first. If you have something on the good side, unlike ms paint, for saving it works great. I'm not sure of the website of the top of my head but I know it is on download.com. I just 'got' Flash MX and it looks good too. I havent had time to mess around with it much yet.

[Hueij]

If you have Photoshop, it comes with ImageReady which is great for making animated gifs. Personally I use Macromedia Fireworks.

[Gemmalah]

I use www gif animator, i got it in a free disk, you can put in bmps and do it like that.

As for where to start how i do it
1. get an idea, make this your first picture, everything stems from that.
2. Move it slightly either an arm or a leg, or whatever, i sometimes do a cartoon strip of what i want my charactor to do.
3. keep going.

Thats rather short i know, other things are..
1. it's easer to make things dissapear then appear, because you start with a picture then get rid of it insted make a picture come out of nowhere. If you want something to appear, do it backwards then reorder the frames the right way when you construct it.
2. practice, take on challenges from friends, my boyfriend wanted me to draw him rolling a fag, so i went one better and he was rolling a joint, i may post it one day.
3. if you can't animate people just yet you can find walking templates around this site. But to begin with animate things you know how they move, I started with an alien because it does not matter if they don't move just right, untill you are better at the whole animating thing.

[Gilbert]

Well... I use the GIMP, or mostly, some old DOS command line proggie...

[kaaZ]

I use Photoshop with Imageready...works pretty good for me...
and AfterFX as well...which works realy good even for image sequences...