BALL.GIF

This animated GIF is made up of six cels displayed one after the other:

cel 1, 20/100s delay

cel 2, 10/100s delay

cel 3, 5/100s delay

cel 4, 10/100s delay

cel 5, 20/100s delay

cel 6, 50/100s delay

To make the ball seem to be moving without leaving any shadow balls along the way, I chose to replace cels by background color. To make the background transparent, I chose black (the background color) as the transparent color for each image.

Notice the different delay times between frames. A falling object accelerates as it falls, and a rising object decelerates as it rises. To simulate this, I shortened the delay between frames as the ball "fell" and lengthened the delay as the ball "rose". If I had wanted an even more realistic effect, I could have flattened the bottom of the ball as it "hit bottom".

I can't remember how large the original animated GIF was, but you can be sure that it was plenty big. I optimized the animated GIF in two different ways, once using GIF Wizard and another time using Ulead's built-in optimization wizard. In both cases, a 32-color image of about 9K was the best result.