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Some images are worth 1000 words. Similarly, some movies, or animations, are worth 1000 images, even if they are made up of fewer. What I'm trying to say is that there are some concepts which are better illustrated using animations rather than just graphs or images. Hal Levison, for example, shows movies of orbits changing as a function of time that give a better impression of orbital evolution, and in less time, than a succession of plots. Strategic use of animations really increases the amount of understanding that you can transmit to your audience in a 7-minute talk. Generating simple animations is easy using the command-line-driven ImageMagick software.

A movie or animation is composed of a series of images. In order to make an animation, first create the images that you want to animate. For the animated .GIF below I wrote a script to output 180 frames of Titan as frame000.tif through frame179.tif. To animate them using ImageMagick, use the 'convert' command:

> convert -delay 10  frame*.tif Titan.gif

The last filename listed becomes the filename and type that the animations is converted to. The 'delay' flag controls how long to wait between displaying successive frames. ImageMagick is smart enough to convert into other movie formats as well, such as .mpg and .mng -- just change the extension on the last filename.

To test your animation you can either bring it up in a web browser (if it's an animated .gif) or use the ImageMagick 'animate' command:

> animate Titan.gif 

ImageMagick does have a Windows version, though I haven't tested it. There are surely other programs out there to deal with animations as well -- if you know of one or have a favorite, please describe it in the comments section below!

Rotating Titan animated .GIF.