Telling stories in film - or using active gifs

I'm going to have to post a proper review of Creating Short films for the Web but for now I just wanted briefly to rave about it. Hillman Curtis is an ex Adobe staffer who has moved from being a designer and developer to being a film maker using flash to make movies for the web. This is his 'how I got started' casestudies plus 'how to' book. And its great.

We were messing about in the garden trying to take a family photo for a child we are sponsoring - the original idea was to take a family picture and drop in the missing photographer but it all got a bit out of hand. Which gave me the idea of making an animated gif of the failed blurry photos. I think it actually works quite well - there are 4 separate stories to watch - 5 if you count the movement of the ball!  And you only need a handful of images to tell it. Film making with stills in a few minutes. Trouble is it doesn't fit the brief because Daniel in Ecuador doesn't have a computer so you can enjoy it instead! I bet the computer you are using now has the software to make animated gifs. Worth a look.  - Is it film making? I lead you to judge.