Animation by Margaret Brown

This jeep animation is a transparent one, allowing the document background, which contains the desert scene, to show behind the jeep.  You will notice that the desert plants and cactus can be seen through the jeep's windows.  The colors in the desert look best if you use a screen mode with at least 16-bit High Color (64K colors). 

It is complicated to create a GIF animation which contains in the one file, both the foreground containing a moving object, and the background containing the bitmap for the desert.  The file needs to be small, and the graphics should not have their colors distorted by palette shifting or dithering.  My solution in this animation was to keep the foreground and background as separate files, and this seems to work very well.

The aeroplane animation on the previous page uses a related technique. The two images which make up the scene are displayed together, with one image placed immediately below the other, allowing no space between the images, so that they appear as if they were the one image.  I used two different GIF files.  The lower image, the scene of the mountain lake, consists of a single static image in one file, and the moving object is in a separate GIF animation file.