animated gif

Hi to all, Before I decided to post this, I tried to find out as much as I could about php, and the possibility of generating an animated gif on the fly...from the docs I found, php does not generate animated gifs...although some folks are looking into this....but since this has not been completed to my knowledge, my question is this: I thought I could just generate an image...do a sleep and an image destroy (and possibly a flush), then generate a second image, followed by a sleep an ddestroy...but this is not working...I have tried it numerous ways, but can't seem to get it to work. Anyone else have any luck with this in the past? Do you thik I will have to just create an image, save it to a file...and then when all my images are created, do a system call and run gifsicle, and then call up the new animated gif? I would rather do just everything via php, and no outside system calls...but am new to php, and wasn't sure Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jessica