islanded in a stream of stars

Mine are somewhat primitive, but the basic concept is to make a multi-layered PSD file in Adobe Photoshop, with each layer showing what you want in each frame of animation. Make sure to save this as an Adobe PSD file. Then you go to Adobe ImageReady, click on the animation tab under the window menu, and click on the two squares in each other in the animation toolbox to create multiple frames. For each frame you click on the eye symbol next to the layer that you want to show up. Then go to file, save optimization as a GIF. It's pretty simple. You can adjust how long you want to show each frame and other nifty things like that.