so take a bunch of individual screen shots of the movie and turn them into an animated gif.
What he said.  I use VLC player. Play/Pause/Screenshot paste into Paintshop Pro, rinse, repeat.  Over and over.  Gotta be quick on the Play/Pause.   
 
  Cut and paste the screenshot to get what I want.  Resize the cut and paste.  I use Animation Shop for the gif because it pretty much does everything else for you.
I originally had 114 shots for my sig gif and ended up using 40 in the end product.
Really the hardest part is taking the screenshots.
wrongway