Apologies if I'm posting in the wrong forum. My level of animation experience is "can make animated GIFs for the web", but I'm not sure that's what's needed here.
Over on the site flyingwhiledisabled.com, I have an image of an airplane with a wheelchair being kicked out of it. I've added the clouds to the background using a Jquery library called Spritely, but having moving clouds with a static image to show a wheelchair that should be falling looks weird. I'd like the airplane to also have some movement as shown in the Spritely demo, but if I just make the entire image with the static wheelchair move around that will look weird as well. I considered making a large animated GIF that would have the cargo hatch on the airplane closed initially, then open, then have a tiny wheelchair get kicked out, reach a peak while getting larger as it gets closer to the viewer, and then drop straight down, but the file size to that would be huge. It would save room if I could just have the airplane image with a simple animation of a cargo hatch open and another frame, and move it around on the page with Spritely, and then have the separate wheelchair image initially start out small and then get larger as it follows a path, then drop straight down and disappear. Not sure how I could get the cargo hatch animation to play at the correct time, or have the wheelchair began its path at the cargo hatch every time if the airplane is randomly moving.
Any ideas how this can be done without horrendous file sizes? I would appreciate being pointed in the right direction. :-)
