I just thought of a clarification for my question about the rotation tool.
The move tool has an option to set the movement axes to a specific face, click "set to face" or something, and then click the face, and you can move in a perpendicular direction, which is very handy.
Is there anything similar to this for the rotate tool, or does that go against the principles of animating things?

tweetytunes- elements works ok for lots of things, but I should probably invest in photoshop CS4 sometime. I just haven't learned enough photoshop skills to fully utilize it