Animated Christmas Card

Every year around Christmas time, people email around these great flashing lights animated Christmas Cards.

So this year I decided I would have a go at making one myself as an animated GIF file. The resulting output from this project is shown above.

Next Christmas I will aim a bit higher and make a Flash animation, that has Christmas Carol music with it as well as moving images.

The following instructions and resources files are specifically for making the above Christmas Card in Adobe CS3 Fireworks, but could easily be used to make the same type of animation in Photoshop, or various other photo imaging software.

The resource files supply the Background, Christmas tree, and Merry Christmas text, and it is just a matter of progressively coloring in the lights for each letter, and building this into a standard frame by frame animation.
So this card could be easily built in Flash as well.

Once we are finished making our animated card, we can insert the GIF file into an email to send it to all of our friends.
(This works fine in MS Outlook mail, but does not seem to work in Hotmail unfortunately).

To get around the Hotmail problem, we can save our card from Fireworks, as a Flash SWF file. We can then attach and send the SWF to our friends, and tell them to open it to play on their PC. (We did find however that the Flash SWF does seemed to play slightly faster than our GIF for some reason).

Here is a 1.48 Mb PDF file of detailed step by step instructions to make an animated GIF card like the one shown on this Blog post:

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “Make a Xmas Card” PDF

To download a 1.39MB RAR file of Resources for this project, click the link below

Click Here to Download the Resource Files for this project


So if you need a little electronic DIY pre-Christmas Project, then why not make an animated GIF card and email it to all of your friends.

In addition, Christmas animations can be made in PowerPoint by using GIFs obtained from Google Images.

Here is a Jing video capture of a Christmas PowerPoint that my students made. They obtained animated GIFs from Google Images and each made a slide, We then combined the slides into a single PowerPoint with a music backing track.



Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi