If I read this right you are trying to preserve an image with a animated effect, linking three such images together in Image Ready. Hard ask. Image ready is not the best program for animated gifs, ulead or easy gif animator are more flexable when it comes to effects and large file sizes.
If you only have imageready to use try to flatten layers and keep your colors to web colors. (This reduces the amount of color but keeps the image uniform). Try to use as many images as possible with small movements, each image should become a seperate frame.
This should help to preserve quality and keep the file size reasonable. If you want to do some kick ass animated stuff start askin splodge about flash, he's got that program sorted. If you want to stay in the animated gif stuff get Ulead gif animator, its not the easiset to use but for keeping image quality and reasonable files size for contest enteries its not to bad. Quite cheap if you buy on line.
Hope that helped.