Northern Lights Tutorial

Skill level: All
Elliptical Gradient Fill Tool

This tutorial shows how to create an animated background effect similar to the Northern Lights. First of all you need an object to put in the foreground. You can click on the graphic and download my snowman, if you like, or you could use Stephanie's Millenium Bear (or any other suitable PI object. Santa, Kids with sleds, etc). When we have our object placed on the graphic, unmerged, we'll develop the basic background. Then we'll place different elliptical or linear overlays on the basic background, and saving the various frames to form the building blocks of our animation. These overlays have a merge choice that allows you create some very wild effects. After creating the frames, we'll combine the individual shots in GIF Animator to make the Northern Lights come alive!
My Gif Animator Tutorial will give you some instruction on how to make a typical animation.

Snowman5

Snowman6

Snowman7

You should now have 5-10 files. From here, all that is necessary is to start GIF animator, and load the new gifs in accordance with
My Gif Animator tutorial.