How do you make the animations?

Since this is a question that comes up rather often, I'll try to answer it as detailed as possible, and I'll use the Jack/Will kiss as an example:

First I took screencaps of the kiss, every 4th frame (you can of course take every 3rd or every 2nd, but the animations get a lot bigger that way, and they turn out fine with every 4th frame anyway. Taking only every 5th frame makes them look too choppy, in my opinion.)

I work with Photoshop ImageReady to make all my animations, so the next step for me was to put all the screencaps into a .psd, align them, resize them and cut off the widescreen tags. Then the fun really began: in every frame, I had to cut Elizabeth out of the picture. (In other kisses, I just cut out the kisser, and erase all of the background. The good thing about this is that the kissee can be inserted easier because there is no background he has to fit into, and that the animation's file size is a lot smaller this way. The bad thing is that without the background, the whole kiss looks a bit out of context. I liked the oceanic background of the PotC kiss enough to want to keep it.)

After getting rid of Elizabeth, I tried to find a scene where Jack was standing with his back 3/4 to the camera, and where he was slightly turning his head. I was very lucky: his stance and position in the scene where he talks to Murtogg and Mullroy for the first time fit my expectations perfectly. I took as many frames as were necessary for the kiss. In this case, using only every 4th doesn't matter. What's important is that the Jack frames fit together with the Will frames. It took some comparing with the original Elizabeth to get the right ones.

The next step, of course, was to cut out Jack.

Then for the puzzling. I added the Jack frames to the Will animation. Since in some places, Will's face is behind Jack, but his hand is touching his shoulder, I duplicated each Will layer and put the corresponding Jack layer between the two. I worked like this for every single frame of the animation. Then I cut out bits that were unnecessary. I took a slice of the ocean, duplicated and stretched it, so that the holes left by Elizabeth that weren't filled by Jack were accounted for. I smudged Jack's and Will's edges to get rid of the cut-out look.
After creating every frame, I flipped through them to see if they ran smoothly, and altered those who didn't. Finally, I added the Mayhem initial (which is now replaced by the BK url).

And voilà! There you have your kiss. Time it took me to make it: approximately 10 hours. Not in one go, obviously. I worked on this animation over the course of several weeks.

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