The next excerpt is all about telling a story onto flatland and detailing time which can be done in many ways “Painting four-variable narrations of space-time onto flatland” (Tufte, 1990, P.97). Life cycles are a great way to show “a smooth escape from flatland” (Tufte, 1990, p.110). They detail all the information in one image from how something lives to how it dies over a certain period of time take this image of a cotton plant from seed to harvest (How does Cotton Grow in Australia, 2021).
Storyboards will be great for the animation to depict the flow of time and the narrative behind it because they show you all the information at once for you to see each and every change while analyzing what’s happening.
Forest fires happen quite often but not all of them attract media attention and in this GIF we can see the progression of Wildfires from 1983 to 2015 and how they have been slowly increasing.
If this GIF was images side by side rather than on a loop it would make the information much easier to analyze because it would be considered small multiples but unfortunately, the author (Lafond, 2015) decided upon this format to demonstrate the progression of time, unlike the previous examples above which you are able to see all the information at once, but for seeing the progression of time over many years it does the job very well.
LaFond, K. and LaFond, K., 2021. Animation: Progression of Wildfires in the United States. [online] Circle of Blue. Available at: <https://www.circleofblue.org/2015/world/animation-progression-wildfires-united-states/> [Accessed 17 October 2021].
Pinterest. 2021. A storyboard is a series of pictures accompanied by descriptive text that allow you to plan wha… | Storyboard examples, Create a storyboard, Storyboard illustration. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/321303754659365184/> [Accessed 16 October 2021].
Theodoregosh. The Story of Cotton by Theodore State School. 2021. How does Cotton Grow in Australia. [online] Available at: <https://theodorearchibull.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/how-does-cotton-grow-in-australia/> [Accessed 16 October 2021].
Tufte, E., 1990. Envisioning information. Cheshire, Connecticut:Graphics.
