Let me begin by saying that I am not planning to teach you how to make animations in this episode of SL for beginners. Apart from any other consideration, I am not qualified: my one attempt at animation ended up looking like "badly put together robot does cookery demonstration". Not the look I was going for.

What I plan to explain is how animations can be used, and how to differentiate them, something which really confuses people new to SL.

In your inventory, you have two main folders for animation, the gestures folder and the animations folder. If you acquire new animations or gestures they should automatically be filtered into these folders unless you move them somewhere else, but sometimes bought objects come in a folder with accompanying gestures or animations which have to be physically moved to those folders.

Gestures are short animations for particular activities, like clapping, laughing, pointing. Gestures need to be activated to work. The ones that everyone starts with are linked to particular triggers, sometimes automatically triggering when you say a particular word, sometimes requiring you to type a slash and then the word to indicate that you want the gesture to trigger. You can change these triggers should you wish to. Some of the gestures are packaged with a sound that triggers too.

You can turn on and off the gestures in your gestures folder by right clicking them and choose to activate or deactivate, and then the activated ones will work when you use the trigger. You can recognize a gesture by the icon which is used to denote it, which looks like an angry man punching the air, to me.

Animations are longer sequences of movement. They are denoted by a running person icon in your inventory and can be used in a variety of ways. Unfortunately the icon is the same whether something is a pose -- static -- or an animation. I tend to keep a pose folder inside my animations folder, and I move any poses to that folder, to distinguish them.They can be used directly from your inventory. If you double click on any of them, a small window will open, offering you the chance to play in world or play locally. If you play in world, everyone can see what you do. If you play locally, you're the only one who can see it.

Some animations don't work very well this way. Walks will make your avatar walk on the spot, for example. Active animations like that, designed for one person, are best used in animation overrides. These are attachments that you wear, containing a script, a group of animations and a notecard, which overrides the default animations. This means that when your avatar walks, for example, your animation override tells your avatar to use the animated walk you have chosen instead of that rather jerky default walk.

There is a free animation overrider available all over the place, into which you can drop your animations. It comes with instructions, and isn't difficult to use. There is a wide range of commercial animation overriders available around SL too, which are all set up and ready to go, with anims, card and script.

As with many things, you pay your money and take your choice. You can buy premade ones, but be stuck with some animations you hate, or make your own, which involves a bit of work, and maybe expense of buying the animations, although there are quite a few free ones available.

Confusingly, animations can also be put in external objects. There are a lot of ways that this can be done, and a lot of scripts out there, but basically the animations will either be directly in an object like a chair or a bed, with a script, or they will be in a pose ball.

Pose balls are wrongly named, really, as most of them contain animations and not poses. A pose is a static position which places your avatar in that position until you stand up. An animation takes your avatar through a sequence, sometimes a looping sequence that repeats over and over, and sometimes a single run through and stop.

Pose balls can be bought and placed where you want them, and they can be linked to furniture too. If pose balls are linked to furniture, then they will trigger when you choose to sit on it.

Very confusingly for new people, some chairs make you sit when you left click on them, but will place you according to where you placed your click, and so you may find yourself sitting sideways or on the edge of the seat. Some cycle through animations or poses when you left click on them, or offer a menu of choices. Some require right clicking and then put you in the last linked pose. There isn't anyone in SL who knows exactly what a chair will do to them when they click on it.

Some objects allow multiple users to click on them and use them together. The most ubiquitous is the dance ball or dance machine, which you can click on to join in the dancing. Again, these are all different: they have different scripts, different animated dances, and different levels of sophistication. Some will allow every dancer to control their dance, and choose another if they don't like the currently playing one, some will lock all dancers into a riverdance routine.

With animations and poses, there is no substitute for looking at what other people have and doing some market research. There are some terrible, terrible pose balls out there, which have similar levels of achievement in animation as I have achieved -- and yet people are selling them. There are some fantastic animators working in SL too, and they have a wealth of animated pose balls for sale.

Finally, there are animations which require two or more people to work at all. some of the couples dance balls work like that -- the first person to click them is stuck in a static pose until their partner clicks on the balls, and then both begin to dance like professionals. These are generally synchronised with a script, which may go out of whack for a variety of reasons -- usually jumping off and back on will solve the issue.

Sex balls work in this way too - they synchronise, and may run more than one animation in a sequence. They may also require you to jump off and on if things get out of synch.

Sometimes, objects with animations and animation overriders will fight with each other, leaving you buried in a piece of furniture or stuck in a wild position. Most of the animation overriders allow you to turn them off, and so standing up, turning off the animation overrider and trying again is always a good start with fixing these problems.

You may also find yourself stuck in an animation you can't get out of, from any source. There are a number of troubleshooting things to try. There is now a "stop all animations" choice in the tools menu, which may help. Hitting the fly and then stop flying button at the bottom of the screen may help. Choosing to sit and then stand up using a pose ball may also clear it.

It may also help to know that when an animator uploads an animation to SL, they have to decide what priority to give it. So some animations are priority one, some are priority two etc. Some of them will override the default typing animation, and some won't, for this reason -- it isn't anything you are doing.

I hope this helps to make some sense of the wonderful world of animation. To really get the hang of it, there isn't any substitute for in-world practice. And it can be a lot of fun. You may even meet the girl of your dreams, waiting for a partner for the amazing tango in my friend Craig's Bits and Bobs emporium.