Apr 11 2006
Animating Static Maps - The Geologic Evolution of North America
The Cartography blog recently talked about a series of excellent Paleogeographic maps developed by Dr. Ron Blakey at Northern Arizona University. Ever since I first studied geology, I had dreamed of an atlas that would clearly and visually demostrate how our current land masses came to be. This time series of maps focuses on North America and the geologic events that shaped have shaped it for the last 500 million years. Truly fascinating and excellent work. I encourage everyone to check out the site and read a little about it as well as the narrative by Geoff Manaugh .
Now it occured to me that a time series of maps lends itself very well to an animated sequence. While I am no graphic artist, I have done a few projects in the past that required stiching together a time-series of maps into an animated gif. The process is fairly simple:
- Download or create each map you want to include in the series. For best results, all maps should have the same size and extents.
- Rename the images in alpha-numeric order (001.jpg, 002.jpg…. 045.jpg)
- Install ImageMagick - a collection of efficient command line tools for image processing. It supports almost every common image format available these days.
- run the convert command to create the animated gif:
convert -geometry 500x483 -delay 200 -loop 0 *.jpg mymovie.gif
The geometry is simply the WIDTHxHEIGHT dimensions of the output image (it helps if this is proportional to the original image dimensions).
The delay parameter specifies how many hundreths of a second delay occurs between each frame.
The loop parameter, when set to zero, indicates the gif will loop infinitely.
The *.jpg, if your operating environment supports wildcards, will take each of the jpg images in the current directory and stich them into an animated gif named mymovie.gif
Viola! An animated movie from a series of static maps. In the case of the Paleogeologic maps, there were 41 maps which produced a sizable animated gif (about 7.5 MB). You can check out the results here. I could watch this play for hours!! Really fascinating stuff.. many thanks to Dr. Ron Blakey for putting this project together.
Extra points–and a free dinner–to anyone who puts it in Flash with a slider bar showing geologic time…
BT
Brian, I agreed. An animated gif is so 1990’s! I’ll buy the beer if someone makes a flash interface around it… and publishes the source code
Sweet! I’d like a high res subset of the second-to-last frame. I spent my college days on the shore of old Lake Bonneville.
Sweet hack, Matt. I’ve always loved the geologic animations too — Tanya Atwater, a geologist at UCSB, put together some of the best geologic animations I’ve seen. There is a sense of awe observing a process longer than the length of our species’ existence.
Matt:
OK, there’s a free set of utilities–swftools–that you can convert animated gifs the SWFs automatically. Seems to work, but I can’t seem to adjust the framerate.
However…I do have access to the Macromedia developer suite and it wouldn’t take much for me to follow through on my own idea (yeah, it’s always the “follow-through” that’s the problem) and add the slider and labels. So if you have the geologic time for each of the 41 frames, I could quickly turn around with a small offering to the cause of knowledge….
BT