How to Make Animated Visualization GIFs with ImageMagick
Using the library command-line gets you more flexibility to highlight the important parts of the data.
I already covered how to make animated heatmaps in R, but in this tutorial you learn more about customizing the animation itself. Notice that in the animated GIF above, there is a pause in the middle to indicate a changing point and a pause at the end to show the most recent difference.
If you used the animation package in R, you could string together the images to make an animation, but you wouldn’t be able to create those pauses in between.
So instead, I created the images in R and then used ImageMagick command-line to string the images together — with the pause in between. For animated GIFs, the animation package uses ImageMagick. So going direct isn’t that big of a jump, and it gets you more flexibility.
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About the Author
Nathan Yau is a statistician who works primarily with visualization. He earned his PhD in statistics from UCLA, is the author of two best-selling books — Data Points and Visualize This — and runs FlowingData. Introvert. Likes food. Likes beer.
