Making Pictures Move

November 18, 2025

From a really early age, the idea of making pictures move always fascinated me. I had no clue how it worked, so I assumed it was just some sort of magic… until…

The Adventures of Batman & Robin Cartoon Maker – 1997

The earliest memory I have from trying this was with The Adventures of Batman & Robin Cartoon Maker, which my Dad bought for me when I first started using the computer around 1997.

This was a really fun program which gave you a ton of different assets and a way for you to easily chain things together with almost no effort. The software was completely unhinged, and most of the time I’d make fart jokes and giggle to myself.

This is the sort of insane stuff I would make, this isn’t mine though. Sadly all mine were lost to time, probably for the best.

Bannershop GIF Animator 3.1 – 2002

After this I never really touched anything close to “video editing” until 2001/2002 when I started playing RuneScape. I saw a bunch of talented people like DragonSkills, W13 and Neon_Skiez create really funny RuneScape videos, at least, they were funny at the time to an 11 year old.

Above is by W13 and considered one of the first RuneScape videos ever.

Above is by DragonSkills, a good friend of mine from the old RuneScape days. He always made really rude and somehow crystal clear RS gifs.

I got pretty inspired, and using MS Paint I made frame by frame animations and put them into a new program I found called Bannershop GIF Animator 3.1. Eventually, I outputted these monstrosities.

What’s funny is, I used to save each frame as a JPEG so they’d be progressively worse quality as the gif continued to use the same background. It took me ages to figure out that I shouldn’t be using JPEG. I had a lot of fun making these, and I grew an appreciation for those that actually did make good videos/gifs… it was a ton of work even for my horrible gifs!

Macromedia Flash – 2007

A few years later I went to college, and got the chance to learn Macromedia Flash (Now Adobe Flash), which was a lot of fun. At this time I was heavily inspired by Fat-Pie (David Firth) and Weebl’s Stuff. Me and my friend Ryan, who was equally obsessed with flash videos, agreed to create our own little website called I Live In A Shed (.com)

It was just two teenagers full of weird and insane ideas. We had almost zero flash skills despite learning it at College. I still have our .txt file from 2007 with all of our ideas, here’s a few quotes:

“A guy with a pizza shaped head”
“Llama choking on a twix”
“Story about a guy who constantly gets attacked by a hawk and goes crazy”
“Estate agent knocks on bathroom door and someone shouts “I’M HAVING A SHIT!! HANG ON!!””
“A welsh lion that gets picked on by 3 goats”
“A gherkin”

As you can see, we were never going to be the next Weebl’s Stuff unfortunately. In the end we ended up making a single comic (Lost to time) before giving up entirely.

The only thing I ended up making were the intro to the website and “Pizza head dude”.

Windows Movie Maker – 2007

It was around this time that I also got very interested with Windows Movie Maker. I often took clips from Jedi Academy using Fraps and merged them into fun scenes. YouTube was starting to become very popular, so I uploaded some of my videos there.

Sony Vegas – 2018

As time went on I experimented with different software, but usually always settled back with Windows Movie Maker, until it was discontinued. Many years later when our friend group got its own Discord server, I got my hands on Sony Vegas very cheap through Humble Bundle and have stuck with it to this day. I’ve been making goofy stuff on my Foxhole videos since around 2018. The aim was never to get views/subscribers, but to just archive the fun we have on misc games we play together.

I had never really made anything “serious” with videos, going back all the way from my Batman farting days to a Llama choking on a twix. In 2020 during Covid I decided to go for it and make some videos dedicated to stuff I love. This really led me to take myself a bit more seriously, but it came at the cost of wanting things to be perfect. Instead of a video taking a day, maybe two days at most, these videos would take months to put together. Because of this, there’s not many of them out there, but I’m very happy that I decided to give that a go.

This is one of my favourite hobbies, and it’s been fun reflecting on where I started when I was 7 vs where I am now nearly 30 years later. Much like most of my hobbies, I’m not a master by any stretch of the imagination, but it gives me endless fun, so I couldn’t care less who watches them. Thanks for reading! 😀