Animation in a (.gif)y

Last week, I was observing my profile image. I've had that same picture there for almost a year now, & not just here on Blogger, but on Facebook, deviantArt & a bunch of other websites I galavant through on a regular basis. I thought it was finally time to make myself a new one to replace last year's model. I wanted to make something snazzier, so I opened up Flash & in about 2 hours I animated, cleaned up & colored in my new avatar. At first it was simple, but by the end (like everything else I animate) I went overboard.

Here's what I ended up with: 

Click the Image to Watch

Everything seemed to be fine, until I tried to post it on deviantArt.

The site has a .gif limit of only 15KB. This baby was a whopping 60KB, way over the limit. With a little help from friends & lot of butchering, I brought the file down to a measly 14KB. To get it down to that size, I got rid of all the color, lowered the image quality to about 12%, shrunk the size down to 36 pixels & cut out 2/3 of the frames. It was finally small enough to post, but by that point the animation was unrecognizable, so I canned it. Defeated, I went back to the drawing board & in 45 minutes created another, less-overdone avatar:

Click the Image to Watch

Unlike the last one, the file size on this was only 8KB, so I finally was able to change my DA avatar. But sadly, that was the only profile image I could change. For some reason, Blogger can't upload animated .gifs on the profile pages anymore, so all that work was pretty much for naught. 

Ah well, back to the drawing board (again). I'll change my profile image eventually, but since it isn't imperative at this point, it can wait a little while longer.