For the menu's I rotated it 90 degrees, coloured it in, and made lots of copies with a blue blade of increasing length. Downloaded some trial gif animation software, put them altogether, hey presto, I had some cool animated lightsabers.
Just a blue lightsaber was very boring, so I made a red one as well (copy of blue, but change all the blades of the copy to red). I also experimented with the speed of the blade, and trying to make it smoother, although my first attempt was actually the best I ever managed!
Then I got bored with just 2 colours (I'm like a woman, get bored easily it seems!), so I added a green and purple one, in keeping with the colours used in the films.
I was happy at this point, I had 4 different colour lightsaber menus, that worked how I wanted them to.
But then I started noticing problems, and worse, other people noticed them and told me! To start with, I hadn't made the background on my lightsabers transparent, and you could see that when they ignited. Also due to their size I had to have a huge menu bar, so for near blind people who run really low resolutions (800x600 etc) the menu bar took up half the screen. Not good. I didn't realise just how bad it was until I tried low res myself, and then I saw it was so bad I could no longer refrain from redrawing them.
So now I had to decide how to make them smaller - only one option really - scale down the whole lot, which means draw it from scratch. Which means everything prior to this point is bin fodder (except maybe the background). I had wasted that part of my life.
I started with the blue one again, took a copy of the 'blue' folder, and reduced the first image by 50%. Reducing the size of images in paint seems to mess up the colours, at least if they're basic images where you want the same colours. So I deleted that and drew it from scratch. I no longer have an animated copy, here's the hilt though:
As soon as this one was made I put it online and shrunk the menu bar so my site was more usable - better that with just blue lightsabers than virtually unusable with multi coloured lightsabers! This was also the first one with a transparent background.
Next I had to make another colour, so the same old task of copying my 'blue' folder, changing the colour of the blade on all the images (11 per saber), making them all transparent and animating. Long.
Unfortunately I had been thinking during this time, which is a very bad idea. I came up with the idea of using different handles for each colour - no two lightsabers are identical in the films, why should they be on my site? So that meant trawling through google looking for images of lightsabers - here's some I found:
The original handle I had drawn most closely resembled Luke's green lightsaber (which is also similar to Obi-Wan's blue lightsaber in Star Wars: A New Hope). I already had a picture of Luke's blue lightsaber, so decided I'd use my original for the green one. After drawing the new lightsabers with handles to match Luke's (blue), Darth Vader's (red) and Mace Windu's (purple), I decided my original handle looked nothing like Luke's Green lightsaber, so redrew it! Here's a copy of the green one before the redraw:
and the new blue one:
This was the worst one of all of my new sabers, for the simple reason it's flat, and doesn't have enough detail to hide that. And several people said this to me as well, so my next task was to shade my new lightsabers so they looked cylindrical.
Almost there now, by this point all except one looked like the lightsabers in my menu. The only one that didn't was the purple one, which was like this:
Oh dear. I had drawn the handle back to front. If someone had used this in reality they would have impaled themselves. But it's not reality, it's fantasy, and I can redraw lightsabers! I found a new image of the handle which was more detailed than my original image
and created a handle from this, which I think does look a lot better than the back to front one (even if you don't know which way it's meant to face, clearly I didn't!).
And there we have it. The original background image has survived so far, but it is so rubbish in comparison to my new sabers, I can guarantee it will change in the near future! Sorry for boring you, but I did warn you at the top!