Why animation?

Animation can add an expressive element to your message. Animation can take the form of a slideshow with floating text or it can emulate a short movie. Colour, movement, expressions and action can be effective in attracting the viewer's attention in ways that text cannot - telling stories and sharing information in a manner that taps into shared social, cultural, or political assumptions. Animations can also evoke responses from diverse audiences, helping to overcome cultural barriers. The messages they convey can be light and entertaining or serious and powerful.

Simple animations are great for advocacy work for the following reasons;

• They can be funny and are great for political satire
• They can attract attention more effectively than just a drawn image or photograph
• They can be used in lots of different spaces and shared and distributed in different ways; via email as an attachment, on a website or even via a mobile phone.

Small banner animations are a great way for you to publicise your blog or campaign; you can include an animated banner on your site and ask others to include it on their site. We've included some inspiring examples.

Simple GIF animation doesn't require complex software or amazing graphic skills; all it requires is your imagination. They are created using very traditional methods where multiple versions of a scene are drawn with objects or characters changing their position in each successive frame, so that the sequence of frames, when displayed quickly enough, gives the illusion of motion.

Each individual frame of the animation has the display time set in fractions of a second. These frames are displayed in a sequence that can be looped once, infinitely or a fixed number of times.

GIF is an internet standard for displaying animation. Because of this, all the major internet browsers (and even mobile phones) are capable of displaying it and users don't need to install plug-ins or other applications to see animations created in this way.

The basic process is simply to create the frames and then animate them using the GIMP graphics package. To source the images you can draw them yourself, scan them or use photography. Animating text is a simple way to start creating effective animations.