Nice effect ...but how did they do that?

Hi guys and girls,

I've stumpled over some nice looking effects on a Website and I thought of trying to rebuild these by myself, but I guess I am just too stupid for it. I've checked a bunch of Photoshop-related Sites but I could find nothing like it so far. Take a look yourself:

Can anybody pleeezzze give me hint on how to create such a background. Just some keywords would be nice...


How would one go about making this lightning effect? Anybody know a web tute on this?


Thanks,

Monique

tween and the second one maybe frame by frame? i dont' really know...i don't do that much sort of stuff w/ IR.

Kind of looks like using opacity with a layer above to bring the image in and out (2nd one) and maybe using some tween with a mask layer that has some sort of blur to fade it in and out. (1st one)
Then in IR they create a animated gif.

For the A

I belive there is 2 key frame in this one. This is done in image ready...

1)The image (or special font) is used...
2)The smae images is simply blurred a little bit... Like 1 pixel in gaussian blurr

Look closely and you will notice how the border of the second image are blurred ...

Thanks to all of you! I have been toying around a little and I'm getting closer to it.
I will let you all know how the finished product looks!

Thanks again!

Monique