If I had a few hours to work on this, I could probably figure out how to make his .gif flash, but this should suffice.
I found an old school, inefficient,
Rube Goldberg device-like method, but it worked:
What I did:
1) Made a screen capture of a post that contained
Art Mann's handle, avatar, stats, and awards, with
WinSnap.
2) Made a screen capture of someone with a green button.
3) Cropped the
Art Mann screen cap to 135 x 351 pixel dimensions, and the other to 16 x 16 pixels, for the green button.
4) Enlarged the
Art Mann screen cap to 800%, and drew the upper left corner of where the green button from screen cap #2 should be pasted. Selected, copied, pasted green button from screen cap #2 to
Art Mann screen cap, and saved, to create the 'static' green button
Art Mann image posted first.
5) Right-click, download
Art Mann avatar animated .gif. Opened
Art Mann avatar .gif with
ULead Gif Animator, and found that it was composed of six frames, and had ten frames per second. I
could not de-compile the .gif into its' component images.
6) I made six copies of the
Art Mann avatar .gif. In the first one, I eliminated the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th frames, and saved the file. It was effectively a one frame animated .gif. I opened that .gif image with
MS Paint, and saved as .png. In the next copy of the
Art Mann avatar .gif, I eliminated the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th images, and saved. I repeated this procedure for the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th copies, in each case, retaining the unique frame needed to recreate the 6/10 of a second animation.
7) I took the finished 'static' image from 4), and cut it into pieces. The top is 135 x 47 pixels, the middle is 135 x 125, and the bottom is 135 x 151.
8) For each of the six frames for the animation, I flipped the frame horizontally, and added 10 pixels to the width, then flipped it back.
9) I took the 135 x 47 top section, and increased the height to 172 pixels, flipped it 180 degrees, and saved as top + middle.png. I then opened and selected the first frame of the animation, copied it, pasted it into the top + middle template, and saved it as top + middle1. I used the pick colour icon in Paint to select the beige colour at the top, then used the colour fill to change the 10 x 125 white rectangle on the left, added in 8), from white to beige. This procedure was repeated for frames 2-6.
10) I opened top + middle1.png, changed the height to 323 pixels, (+151), to accommodate the bottom section with stats and awards, then flipped the image 180 degrees, and saved as Final1.png. I then opened, selected and copied the bottom section, created in 7), pasted it into top + middle.png, flipped the composite image 180 degrees, and saved. I repeated this for top + middle 2-6.png, to create the six frames needed for the animation.
11) I opened
ULead Gif Animator, opened the project wizard, entered the height and width values, clicked next, imported the six frames, in sequence, set the animation at 10 frames per second, saved as .gif, uploaded this new .gif , and posted the image link here, with two minutes to spare, before my show started.
There must be an easier method I could have used, but I didn't want to spend an hour reading a manual to find out how I could have saved myself ten minutes doing the task.
