Hi mangledreality

You can do all sorts of cool effects in programs such as PaintshopPro. Mine is nowhere near as beautifulas those Jenn (Mental Pollution) has made for many people here. However, what I did was used a fancy font I had on my machine, then saved the image. Then I altered the image slightly by adding a spotlinght effect, and saved my image with a new name. I kept moving the spotlight along and saving each new image with a new name. Then I used Animation Shop (which comes with PaintshopPro) to join the images together as a filmstrip and saved that as an animated (ie moving) gif.

Not sure if this will help but feel free to ask if you think I can help.