This month's tutorial is a lesson in repetition. If you don't like repetitive tasks, you might want to take the month off.

We will create an animated banner for the Gopher Broke Company , (a fictitious company-duh!). By using a series of fisheye lens bitmaps we will create an effect that could pass — with a little willing suspension of disbelief — for a gopher burrowing under a checkered background.

The same technique (that we will be learning this month) was used to create the spinning Priester Island, sorry, Easter Island animation shown here. To achieve the cool fisheye lens effect, we'll use Sean Sedwards' Spherical Mould plug-in filter which you can download from the XaraXone Shareware section. Sean's cool plug-in filter is available in a Freeware version and a Shareware version for £6 (UK) or $10.00 USD. The difference between the two is the Shareware filter is adjustable in terms of mapping and distortion, whereas the Freeware version produces but one preset distortion and is not adjustable.

I recommend the Shareware version which you can try before you buy.

So let's get the ball rolling.