Animating The Wrong Way

Looking back on how i have been animating the routes (which has been one route at at time) i realize that this is taking a long time. So i now plan to go through all the routes and animating the trains once so when it come to doing the whole time table i already have the route animated and all i have to do is adjust the timing of the animated train.

Duplicate Routes

As i have been animating the routes I have realised that even though there are thirty three routes there are a few routes that are within each other, so this shows that there may be loads of routes but there are routes that merge and cross over with each other. Therefore the animation has not have as much as i thought there was.

Time Period To Animate

After spending a week animating train routes I have realised that looking at the time I have to compleate the project i have decided to animate a time period of six hours because by animating twelve hours it would take too long to animate a thirty three routes.

Create An Outline

After showing the PSD of the stations that I plotted in processing processing i thought that it would be best that i create an outline as a guide for when i start animating the model trains, this will be so i have a guideline to keep in

Class Presentation Of Work So Far

After returning to class and presenting my ideas to the class i showed them what point i had got to with my idea. I got good feedback from the class but when i showed my map it was suggested that i keep the outline of the original map so people have something to follow. Therefore i am going to look at the way i have created the map and modify it.

Convert Processing to PSD

After plotting the map in processing I took a still of the processing map and then opened it up in Photoshop and then plotted it again because i have come up with the idea that the stations could appear as the trains go over them the first time.

Design the Train

With my idea being about trains and animation i thought that it would be best to design a small figure to animate instead of dots. Therefore this keeps my animation a long the idea of being based on a train schedule.

Map Plotten In Processing

After completing the edited map I took it into processing and plotted the stations using processing. Now I have completed the map i am going to look at it and see if there is any diffrent ways that i can animate it.

Edited Map

After going through the schedules i found out that there was a number of stations and routes that needed to be taken out. Therefore this is the final outcome map that i need to modify and animate over the top...

Found My Data

After trying to collect all the leaflets of the Southern Rail i resorted to the internet and i have found that all the leaflets are available as pdf's to download. My task now is to go through all of these schedules and compare the stations that they stop at to the map, because after looking at the official map not all the stations on there are owned/run by Southern Rail but are only drop off stations. Therefore once i know the stations that are on the schedule i can remove the ones that are not.

Data Art on BBC Backstage

Search Web

When using the BBC website and you want to find something quick normally you use the search tool similar to google which when you search it gives you a list of results on a page. But with SearchWeb it lets you look for content on the BBC website, by searching terms it then generates a information tree of your searched term containing links to web pages with the BBC homepage at its centre.

By taking the data that is the information you have searched for and presenting it in the form of a tree you can quickly see the connections with the different areas of the BBC that your search has covered. Using a tree structure makes it easier to navigate much easier to follow topics, once again colour is used as a way of showing difference

Public Transport Visualization of North West England

Public Transport Journeys in the North West of England from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

This visualization is showing the public transport in the north west of England. The data was taken from National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR), if you look closely at the map you will see that Liverpool is on the left and Manchester right. By looking at the colour coding on the map and the way that it is layed out, I am analysing that the blue are travel on the roads due to the fact that they are much denser on the map. Also that the whites are trains because they are moving at a much faster speed, there is a less ratio of blue to white and that the whites are animated on a fixed path.

Trafic Visulisation

This visualization is the use of data from Waze users (a mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the other Waze users) combined with passive traffic data. The pulsating circles are alerts from users reporting hazards, traffic jams, highway patrol, and communicating with one another. While the lines are trips made by Waze users, the way that they work is when they first appear in white the trip is starting, then once the trip has been completed they fade to gray.

This shows that by using a length of time can be a good way to show that the data has changed. Also with this example it shows that colour is a way of showing different categories that you may have within your data. I will take this analysis and see if i can apply it to my idea in some way.

My Plan

Now i have researched how flight patterns was made I have a plan to create my idea.

1. take a image of the map into processing
2. plot the points of the train stations over the map
3. take this into photoshop for some further editing
4. take into after effects
   
5. animate the schedules over the map

What I need to do now is collect all the data that i need and analyse it to see if there is any think that i need to take into consideration for my animation.

How Flight Patterns Was Made

After looking further into flight patterns i found out the different stages that it went through to be created. it was created by collecting the data from the FAA, then plotted the data points in processing and animated in after effects.

Aaron Koblin

Due to the fact that Aaron Koblin has inspired my idea with his Flight Patterns, I though that it is best to look further into his career. Aaron koblin is an artist who is well known in creating art using data and digital technologies.

His work with digital arts did not start until 2004 on his course Design Media Arts MFA program at UCLA when he was given a book on procedural graphics and generative art, which also lead him to processing. But processing is not the only programming language that he learned, he also knows ActionScript, Lingo, C++ and Max/MSP.Koblin works by not only using data but other techniques such as crowdsourcing to create his digital art and visualizations.

Crowdsourcing

Aaron Koblin work uses crowdsourcing to generate data, this is done by using ideas and getting other people to participate. The two pieces Ten Thousand Cents and The Sheep Market are created by using the Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labour tool. This is where people are given a tiny piece of a picture to replicate or a drawing of a object to do. But there is no knowledge of the overall task or outcome of what they were drawing.


Data Art

As well as being known for crowdsourcing Aaron Koblin also is known for his data art & visualisations. The best known one is Flight Patterns which is the visualisation of the data that is the paths of air traffic that fly over North America within a 24 hour time span.

Present Idea & Feedback Suggestion

After presenting my idea i have been told to look at it in different ways because at first i way calling my idea data art, but then after looking at my idea in need to not call it data art. But because i am taking data and turning it into something visual i should look at it as a visualization. Therefore i am taking data and visualizing the data in a fun and exciting way as more of an information piece about train scheduling.

Once i presented my idea it was suggested that i look at these websites

http://traintimes.org.uk/map/

http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/

http://transport.wspgroup.fi/hklkartta/

http://www.redfunnel.co.uk/ferry-travel/service-status/live-vessel-positions/

After looking at all of these pieces i have analyzed that these are interactive live data maps and that this is not what i am trying to create. Therefore my aim is to create a visualization of the different routes that the southern rail network does.

Writing Idea Document

After thinking about which idea I would like to do I have decided to do the data visualization and looking at the quotes that i can use from the brief i think that it is best to use...

“The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.”
Jean Baudrillard

I would then title my project " Synchronisation Of The South " to symbolize the fact that people use trains to travel from town to town as a way of organising their lives. While thinking about my project i have thought how i can start my proposal...

"With human life becoming so fast paced the need for travel is needed a lot more, and with the price in petrol increasing a lot more people are turning to using the train. Therefore for my project I would like to create a piece of data are like that of aaron koblins flight patterns. Only I will be using the data of train times of the southern rail company."

My plan now is to write the rest of the proposal by researching how Aaron Koblins Flight Patterns was made.

Independent Project Set

After being told about the independent project a while ago I have been thinking about what to do for it, and now the project has been set there are two ideas that I would like to do.

Idea 1 - Infographics

With the amount of smart phones and devices out on the market it is having a large impact on the way that people run their lives. Therefore for this project I will take a number of statistics about the devices on the market and create an information motion graphics sequence using these statistics.

I will touch on areas of statistics such as…

• How fast these devices get sold
• The amount of apps that are sold
• The most popular apps that are out there
• The ratio of apps sold to devices sold
• How people feel about the devices

An example would be a sequence like this ...



Like this example I would use images combined with text that it highlighted to show key facts.

Idea 2 - Data Visualization

Looking at data in a visual way is interesting because a large amount of figures and numbers have been turned into something that can be visually understood. So my other idea is to pay homage to a visulisation that i find interesting, and this is Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns.



The way that I would do this is by collecting the timetables of the Southern Rail, then like Aaron Koblin i would show the routes on a map. But a way I would make it different is by using the map that Southern Rail has created for there passengers.

Conclusion

after completing my project i can look back and see how I did. Looking back at the trouble I had at the start with choosing a brief i am glad that I choose the Taschen brief because I learned more about how magazine are modified and how they work on the I pad. Also i feel that i have learned more on animation with the techniques that i have used. I feel that by creating animated mock-ups i was very prepared when it come to creating the final things.

I have also learned that i do not have the best voice in the for narration and that i over explain things too much. This has made me realized that when writing a audio description that i need to think a lot about timing and the flow.

Overall I feel that i found this project very challenging and i am pleased with my results. i have learned that with audio description a lot of thought is needed with the voice and slow animations make the user feel that the sequence is just dragging on.