Info Graphics

In this process and production session we experimented with Info Graphics which is when data and graphs are presented in a creative way. We were given the task to collect data about ourselves and present it in a map and a bar chart.

The Map

In Illustrator I created a simple map of my journey to University from my accommodation in Huddersfield. I started by importing a map of Huddersfield in to the first layer so I could work over the top of it and use it as a reference. Where the university is close to the town centre I used the line tool to draw a graduation hat and at this point I decided to use the Marker Felt font through out the project. Next I analysed the map for the most iconic land marks in between the university and my house and created drawings to represent them. Now I had enough of the map shaped out to draw the line that represents my journey from the house to university. I continued drawing more lines that showed the rivers going through the town centre near university. Finally I made the background colour behind the reference map green because it is the common colour I find on standard maps.

When I finished my map in Illustrator I imported it in to After Effects and put it in to its own composition. Next I animated the red line that represents my journey to university with the stroke effect. I started by using the pen tool to trace a path on the red line which allows the stroke effect to follow this path and then I made a keyframe at the start of the path within the stroke attribute and then another keyframe at the end of the path. Finally I changed the stroke colour to cyan so now in the animation a blue line follows the red line from my house to university. Now I created a zoom that at the same time follows the blue line and to do this I created a new composition and placed my new animated map as one layer. I clicked the 3D effect on the one layer in my new composition which puts the map in to a 3D space allowing me to tilt the whole thing on the X, Y and Z axis. Now all at once using keyframes I changed the position, the scale, X axis rotation and the Y axis rotation to create the illusion that a camera is zooming into the map and following the animated line.

The Bar Chart

My bar chart was created on Illustrator and it showed how much time I spent on social network websites in a day. The bar chart was very simple, I created rectangles to use as the bars and the websites I use are Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and Youtube. I wanted to make the bar chart more inviting to look at instead of black and white so I coloured the bars in the colour used in the website's logos or what is seen on their webpage.

I imported my bar chart in to After Effects to animate and to join it with my map animation. I wanted to make the bars in my bar chart appear one at a time from left to right and to do this I used the time line to create keyframes when the bars were at their shortest, then I created more keyframes when they were at the size that represents the amount of time I used them further down the timeline. After creating the animations for each bar I moved them in order on the timeline with Facebook first and then ending with Gmail so when the animation plays Facebook extends first followed by the other bars going to the right.

The Transition

The animation would be slightly more confusing with just the map followed by the bar chart so I created a quick one second transition introducing the bar chart. I created the transition on Illustrator coming up with the simple design of the word "Time Spent" as the same font as the bar chart and map  inside a rhombus. I wanted to follow a similar colour scheme but for it to stand out more so I swapped the colour around having a black background and green text.

I imported my transition design in to After Effects to animate with a number of choices of transitioning techniques to choose from. I only had one second of animation for the transition so I didn't want a transition that travels across the screen because I feared that it would happen to quickly for the viewer to read the text. I found that using the opacity feature in After Effects was the most feasible making my transition screen slowly appear and then disappear. On the timeline where I wanted the transition to start I created a key frame and set the opacity of my "time spent" layer to 0% and then I went to the part of the timeline where I wanted the transition to end and also set the layer's opacity to 0%. Now in the middle of these two keyframes I created another keyframe and set the layer's opacity to 100% so now the layer will slowly appear until the opacity its 100% and then slowly disappear completely.

The Final Outcome




What Did I learn?

During this session I learnt why info graph animations are made and how people go about making these animations. A cool feature I learnt how to do in After Effects was using the stroke feature combined with the pen tool that makes a paint stroke follow a path that was created by the pen tool, we used this to represent our journey on the map.