Many powerful tools are designed specifically for digital animation. Blender, for example, is free software for creating professional 3D animation (see http://www.blender.org/). Compared to Blender, GIMP offers limited animation tools. But if you just want to make a simple animation, GIMP can get the job done. As you saw in Chapter 6, you can use GIMP to make animated GIFs for a web page, and as you’ll see in this chapter, you can also use GIMP to edit a short digital video.
We begin this chapter with the principles of animation, and then we discuss the file formats specific to animations. We also cover GIMP’s various tools for building animations, including GAP (GIMP Animation Plug-in; installed separately from GIMP).