This was made the hard way. A jpeg picture of the earth was opened in GA 5. The oval selection tool was used to make a circular selection area. Then copy and paste made a new object of what was in the selection area. The selection area is then moved over a few pixels, and you copy and paste again. Repeat...

Then a plug-in "punch" effect is used on each object to bulge it out. Then the "Distribute to Frames" function is used.

Lots of work. Ulead's GIF-X 2 Plugin makes this a lot easier, but this was something I had to try to do, just for the challenge.