What is a good free GIF creator?

I am feeling a bit bored and I want something new to do.

I want to make animated GIFs - I've never done it before.

I want to make video GIFs, not a cartoon-type ones. I mean like DVD film-clip ones.

What should I use to make them - I assume I need a GIF creator?

microsoft offers a free one, tho not sure if this is still good. http://www.jhepple.com/gif_animator.htm

Or this:
http://encoderx.co.uk/imageeditors/index.php

Ohh I like that girl's hair...

The pipeline I'd use would be:
(1) VirtualDub (through AviSynth for most non-AVI video types) or VLC Player's image output plugin (for stuff even AviSynth can't do) to dump the frames of the video to images. Possibly decimate the frame rate at this stage, both of them have this option.
(2) Import the image sequence to GIMP with the animation plugin to do the rest - scaling / cropping, quantizing to 256 colours, optimizing to cumulative layers, saving to gif.

I'm going to convert the complete extended versions of the Lord of the Rings Trilolgy to a single GIF - all 3 extended version films to a single GIF.

Currently, I have no real idea of why I am going to do this - but I feel the need to do it - it was a spontaneous decision that I made last night. However, I am intrigued as to how small the file size of the GIF will be - so it is sort of a little adventure for me.

Well I've seen 500x200ish animated gifs (bless those doomed souls) using LoTR snapshops to tell a dubbed story which last a minute long, 1 frame per 10sec, and they rack up around 700k, have fun guessin the file-size if you do the actual DVD resolution @30fps w/ a 256 color pallette.