This page tells how I made the animated semaphore on my home page. It is mainly for the benefit of people who don't already know how animated GIFs are made.
The lower quadrant semaphore is an animated GIF file. (GIF is a file extention which denotes a certain graphic file format.) They aren't usually animated, but GIFs can be made that are.
Originally, the semaphore was in printed form in Train Shed Cyclopedia No. 27, which is a reprint of older material. I obtained the original in digital form using a computer scanner. This is the image below. You can see how inspiring the original is. It shows a lower quadrant semaphore in each of its three possible aspects.
To make animated GIFs, you need to save each frame of the animation in a separate file and use a utility to merge them into a single animated GIF file. Theoretically, it should have been possible to cut each aspect out digitally and save it as one of these files, but the three drawings are not identical even when excepting the blades. Subtle differences become obvious in animation (e.g. the mast jumps around). To proceed, I needed to clean up the mast, ladder, lantern, and pinnacle to form a single signal without blades. Although I started out with a copy of an old drawing, the manipulation was so extensive that I effectively redrew it by editing much of it at the pixel level. Only a few areas didn't have much help.
The blades previously were cut out and edited separately. Having made the clean mast that would appear in all three frames and saved it in the three frame files, blades in appropriate positions were pasted onto the mast in each of the files. Instead of having three masts and six blades as in the original lineup, then, there was one mast with a copy of each blade in its correct position in each file.
I filled the semaphore and its surroundings with color and added highlights to the roundels, stripes to the blades, and a light to the lamp. Also, as you can see, the original has no base. I copied and pasted a short section of the ladder and mast several times, copying the ladder bracket in occasionally, until I achieved the needed length and drew the base and number board from scratch based on photographs that I was looking at. Actually the base and mast are another, static GIF file up to the bottom of the clear distant blade. This is because none of the lower parts move, and three copies of them with their upper parts didn't need to be made into a huge animated graphic. If your web browser is anything like the one I use, the upper, animated file is placed precisely above the lower, static one.
The animated semaphore would not have happened if it had not been for John Strickland, who helped me scan in the original, edited the first iterations of the graphic, did the file format conversion of each of the frames from bitmaps, and compiled the three frames into the final animated file that you see using his utility. Finally, speaking of bitmaps, I think it's worth mentioning that although there are many fancy and costly drawing software packages available, I did all of my editing using Paint, which comes as an accessory with Windows. True, it doesn't have some features, but if you learn how to take advantage of changing background colors and transparency, it still has much more functionality than it is usually given credit for having.
That's it. The only major thing it leaves to be desired, in my opinion, is realistic slow motion. In the future, if I find a way to rotate a single piece on a background so that I don't have to make an unruly number of separate frame files, I may create an animated upper quadrant semaphore that operates at prototypical speeds. Until then, if I need something easy, I can always create a working crossing signal of the non wig-wag variety.
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