How Can I Make Cool Maps?
May 21, 2007 3:22 PM   Subscribe

How can I make cool Flash timeline/maps like the one featured in this MetaFilter post?
posted by kirkaracha to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe you could be more specific about what sort of advice you're looking for? You've already figured out that you need Flash, and it's hard to know how to give advice beyond that without just posting the entire Flash manual.

Short answer: You use a map as the background, then depending on your preferences either draw each frame or use in-betweening for the shifting areas. The explosion and other repeated graphics would probably be movie clip objects that you would place in the timeline at the appropriate point.

Is that, uh, anything like the information you were looking for?
posted by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 3:47 PM on May 21, 2007


I think L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg has it. T'other thing you need to consider is your research. Find lots of sources and make notes about what happened. Draw up a storyboard. Test. Use a reduced colour palette.
posted by b33j at 4:01 PM on May 21, 2007


I don't think that video was created using Flash (although I suppose it could have been). I'm fairly certain that no matter what was used to create the movie, the version that was submitted to YouTube was actually an MPG of some kind. Note that you need Flash to view any YouTube video, no matter what the original format is, simply because YouTube embeds everything in Flash.

Having an actually Flash (vector) version without conversion to MPG would have been nice because then the lines wouldn't be all jaggy and you could zoom nicely.

Anyway, my guess at how they made it is that they started with some kind of GIS data and went through maybe ArcMap to Adobe Illustrator... It wouldn't be difficult, exactly, just possibly tedious (depending on the quality of the data you were getting to start with) and probably expensive (unless you already had the data in a useful format and already owned Illustrator).
posted by anaelith at 8:29 PM on May 21, 2007


« Older Software for documents management in Windows   |   Alternative Driving Directions to Google/Mapquest? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.