Step 1: Planning your animation.

The first thing you should do is to plan your animation like a storyboard for a movie. Draw the molecules and decided how you want to animation to look. Where do you want to molecules to move? Do you want to change the sizes of the molecules? What positions do you want the molecules to be in when the reactions take place?

Once you have planned to storyboard, you can decided how large (height and width) the animation is going to be.

Step 2: Draw you molecules in chemdraw.

You will need to draw all your molecules in chemdraw. As an example, I will show a molecule moving across the screen.

Below are the chemdraw structures for an entire reaction. For my animation, I will just show the upper left double bonded structure moving into the center.

Step 3: Copying your molecules into photoshop.

Open photoshop and open a new file: Under the "File" menu, select "New". Set the height and width as you want and set the "mode" to "Grayscale".

Now select a molecule in your chemdraw file. "Copy" the molecule and go back to the photoshop file. Next, "paste" the molecule into the photoshop file.

When you "paste" the molecule, it will paste it into a new layer. You now have a background layer as well as the layer with your molecule. Position the molecule where you want using the pointer tool.

I want to show the molecule moving into the center of the screen from off to the side, so I move the molecule in "Layer 1" to the side of the image.

Then I "paste" the molecule into the photoshop file again. This creates a new layer. I position this molecule a little farther over from the molecule in the first layer as shown below.

Notice the options available to you for each layer:

• The selected layer (highlighted in black) is the layer that you can move and edit.
• The "eye" can be selected and unselected by clicking on it. This hides or shows the layer.

I want to show the double bond moving into the center, and it took me 9 layers to do that. Below is the image now, with all 9 layers shown.

Step 4: Saving your frames as gifs.

Once you have all your layers in the image, go to the "File" menu and select "Save As...". Save the file in "Photoshop" format. So, this image has ALL the layers saved, right?

Next, unselect the "eye" icon on all the layers except for "Layer 1". I've shown below what my image looks like now.

See how all the layers are still there, but I can only see layer1 because the "eye" icon is selected on.

Next under the "Image" menu, drag over "Mode", and select "Bitmap". Click "OK" to flatten layers and discard the hidden layers (the ones you can't see). Now under the "File" menu, select "Save as..." and name your file "frame1.gif" and select "CompuServe GIF" under "Format".

Now you have the first frame. Reopen the original photoshop file with all the layers still included. Next, hide all the layers EXCEPT "layer2". Repeat the above steps to save this image as "frame2.gif", and continue for each layer you have.

Step 5: Putting together the animation.

Now that you have each frame of the animation (each "page" of the "flipbook") saved, the next step is to assemble the animation. Open the program "GifBuilder" at the ~chemh215 website or under MacArchives when you open your IFS space.

This program will allow you to put each frame of your animation together. Under the "File" menu, select "Add Frame...". Select "frame1.gif" and click "Open". Continue doing this for each frame in your animation. When you are done adding all the frames, you can do several things:

• You can make the animation loop a certain number of times. Under the "Options" menu, choose "Loop...".
• Under "Delay" in the "Frames" window, you can double click the number to make some frames last longer than others.

Here is an example of the 9-frame animation I made from the above steps: