u need 2 programs: i suggest you take paint shop pro, and animagic gif, both should be available at www.download.com. 



open both. in psp, you make a new picture, i suggest 150x100 in 32bit color (16.7 million colors. later, it will be 8 bit, 256 colors. however, you can work a lot better with 32bit.). first, you should think about, what smiley its gonna be, and if you want it transparend or not. when its simple, like th ones in my sig, you can make em trans., but if youre planning bigger explosions, or other stuff, maybe a background captured from somewhere (like the one where the smileybusters nuke the smiley king: the background u know from ghostbusters 2)...



okay, i explain it for trans.:

as background color, you have to use a color that will be nowhere else in the animation. green is good. draw the background. i mean, stuff, that the smileys can interact with, like the buffet in my sig, or the trap. this can be anything...(draw a complete panorama, if youre making em NOT transparent, and have fun doin it.)

now, we add the smileys. make a new pic with the same background color (green), it has to be 16x16. then use black to make a circle for the smiley (you'll sure find the tool for this in psp). after that, fill it up with yellow. then, you have to make this pic bigger: 32x32. but DONT interpolate, or just resize it. the smiley must have the same size, but for drawing stuff around it, like proton pack, arms, or something, we need more space (the 16x16 stuff is for easier drawing of the smiley base: his head). now draw a face, and a proton pack, slime bloewer or something. re-do this for every smiley u want in the animation. smart as you are, you select em, without the background, so its very easy for ya, to copy and paste them into the animation, itself.



to keep work small, you make a copy of the background, when its finsihed. you can put the smileys in it, if you DONT want em to move around.



so, now the work on the animation itself begins: you take the first copy of the background (if you want the smileys to move, now its time for copy&pasting em in there.), drawing proton streams, and all the other effects you want in it. then, you copy the whole frame, pasting it into animagic gif. continue doing this until you have all the complete animation together.



sure, you now want to see, what you have done. sorry, youre not done yet. cause if you click on the play-button in animagic, the animation is REVERSED! OH NO! no problem: in its menu, you go frames/reverse order. in the upcoming dialog, you select all of them. then click ok. done? no, we just have to adjust the framerate. go animation/framerate. again, you select em all. i guess about 6-8 frames per second are good. i take 7 fps, the most time. just experiment with that. if you have some text in your animation, you want this text to be a little longer on screen, then just 0.15 seconds. search for the text frame, and at the repeat thing, you tune it up. 1000 milliseconds are 1 second. so much for that. click ok.



if you want the stuff trans., then choose animation/transparent color. the cursor will change. click on that color in the actual frame, wich u want to be "invisible".



now, save the whole thing, (keep the smileys in psp saved as bmp: maybe you want to do another animation?), upload it to your homepage server, and link its url on the gbc message board, or where-ever you want it. your done. :)