Let's play Urble!

Today I'm letting Urble out into the wild. It's a little geography game in which a new city (displayed as a small square) appears every 5 seconds until there are 10 dots on screen (example below). The aim of Urble is to guess the country before the country shape appears - 50 seconds into the video. You can pause the video after the 10th dot (at 45 seconds) if you need more time. If you turn the sound on, you'll notice that when the 10th city is added it makes a different sound. I'm releasing this in video format, just for fun, so people can play it how they want to, and share them across platforms - I have lots of them! Some you might find easy, others no so much. As you might be able to tell, Wordle is part of the inspiration here, hence the colours. You'll see more on my Twitter, where I'll post each Urble using the hashtag #urble. I may give clues for some of the more difficult Urbles.

Are you a map genius?

This is what the end of an Urble looks like

As well as posting these on my Twitter (@undertheraedar) I'll also put each one in The Urble Archive too. Each Urble is numbered, so it's easier to keep track of them, and of course I won't keep you guessing forever - the answer is always revealed 5 seconds before the end of each video. They're all 60 seconds long, so you can get on with the rest of your day, or pause the Urble on 10 dots until you figure it out.

Here's Urble 1 - always best viewed with sound on (there's no music, just a few sound effects). There's also a gif version of each Urble, which I will also post in the archive - you'll always find the original, high-quality Urbles there. Can you guess which country this first one is?

You can see the full size, high-resolution video on The Urble Archive, where I'll put all Urbles after I share them on Twitter.

Urble - why?

Well, I make maps and look at geographic data a lot, and I'd always thought about doing some kind of fun game in a more formalised way. From time to time I've posted geography guessing games on my Twitter but until recently hadn't ever made something like Urble - but now I have. I've been playing this at home so far with my two sons and my wife, and since they like it I'm releasing it into the world now. In fact, my 9 year old son Isaac actually made a few of them himself, with me at his side giving instructions as he put them together in QGIS and Camtasia.

I've said more about Urble in the About file on The Urble Archive page. If you have a question, it may be answered below. Otherwise, check the About file.

The answer to the main 'why?' question here is that it's for fun, but also hopefully educational.

Questions you may have about Urble

What tools did you use to make Urble? I used QGIS for all the map stuff and Camtasia to create the mp4 and gif files. If you want to learn how to use QGIS, check out my Map Academy course on Udemy.

Surely you'll run out of countries pretty quickly? Well, this is sort of true but I can easily re-use countries by selecting a different configuration of cities, in a different order. Watch out for this as new Urbles are released. Maybe I'll repeat countries. Be mindful of this.

What about a country with more than one official capital? Good question. There aren't many of these, but where I do have an Urble for a country with more than one capital, I will only show one of them and it will still be the third city to appear, always as a green square. I will not show other capitals in the same Urble.

How do you decide which cities to show? The capital city is always included, as well as nine other cities that are - usually - among the top 30 by population in a country. In general, I try to make sure the cities give some hint to the shape of the country, but at times you'll need to wait until the 8th or 9th city to see it. Occasionally I add in other cities that help me show the shape of a country, even if they are smaller settlements. But this is the exception.

Why don't you add the city names at the end? Because part of Urble is guessing the cities as well as the countries. At the end you can try to figure it out, if you want to. I also want Urble to be as accessible as possible for an international audience, and adding more text (using place names written in English) wouldn't help with that. 

How do I win? I consider a true 'win' to be any Urble where you figure out what the country is before the country shape appears - i.e. before 50 seconds are up. But if you get it after pausing the video before the country shape appears, you can still count yourself a winner. In fact, if you don't get the country at all but you learn something new, then maybe you can count that as a kind of win as well. If you get the country before the capital appears, you are a true genius. If you get it before the fifth city appears, I salute you!

Can I steal Urble? Please don't, but I don't mind if people share Urbles, with a link back to my Twitter, The Urble Archive, or this page. 

Why didn't you make this into a website? I was going to, but in the end I decided it would be too much bother and actually I like the video-only approach as it's easier to share across different platforms and I don't have to mess around with code that I barely understand. I quite like the fact that you have 60 seconds to guess and also that you can just pause if you need more time.

Surely some countries will be impossible to guess? Well, I suppose that all depends where you're from and what you know. But even so, it is undoubtedly true that some countries are much more well known than others by the majority of people. But I see this as part of the fun - as an Urble unfolds, your brain is working overtime trying to figure out the country shape, country size, configuration of cities, possible patterns (e.g. coastal? river? borders?) and you're against the clock. If you're from Mongolia then you'll probably find it easy to guess Mongolia, but if you know nothing about Mongolia then you'll find it very difficult! But that's okay because if you do an Urble for Mongolia you'll learn something new.

Hasn't someone done this before? I wouldn't be surprised but when I went looking I couldn't find anything that looked like Urble. Lots of map quizzes and geography games online, but I didn't see anything Urble-esque. Obviously we have things like Worldle but that's a different kind of geography game where you guess the country from one big shape. This is something I thought about back in January 2022 when I made a few silly maps for Twitter (one of which is shown below).

This is not Urble

Happy Urbling!

Map animations with ffmpeg

This post is about how to create video animations from a sequence of individual images, using a simple but extremely powerful command line tool called FFmpeg. If you're scared of code, command line stuff and weird computer language in general then this post is for you. Part of my sneaky plan here is to lure you in with enticing visuals so that you overlook a little bit of the complexity - which is really not that complex, I promise. If you're already a Jedi-level coder but maybe haven't used ffmpeg, welcome too. If you're somewhere in the middle, also hi.

I'll try to demystify the mysterious and show you how to do some interesting things without too much pain. To begin with, here's a video I made using ffmpeg, from a series of map frames I exported from QGIS Atlas. But you don't need to know anything about QGIS to complete this tutorial - I've already exported all the individual map frames for you and shared them down below. We're going to fly from London to New York today, and also from London to Rome.

There are a few parts to this tutorial, as follows. If you found this post somehow randomly online and were just looking for how to install ffmpeg and how to run a couple of commands to turn a series of images into a video, then this post is also for you - please read on!

Sections

1. How to install ffmpeg on Windows, Mac or Linux (this can sometimes feel like the hardest part, but it's not very difficult at all, I promise). [Okay, let's be honest for a moment. It can feel a bit painful on Windows, but once you've done it once (in under 15 minutes) you're all set!]

2. Check ffmpeg is actually installed. This is important, but very quick.

3. Get some image frames that we can turn into a video. I've added the two flight-based image sets I refer to in this blog, as well as some additional bonus ones you can play with.

4. Use ffmpeg in Windows Command Prompt or Mac/Linux Terminal and run some commands to create videos.

5. Experiment with different settings to produce different results.

6. Some tips, such as how to name files if you're using QGIS Atlas to export the individual frames, and how to do a few other cool ffmpeg things.

1. Let's install ffmpeg 

I have ffmpeg installed on my Mac, on Linux (I use Ubuntu) and on Windows. I mostly work on Windows but when it comes to ffmpeg the syntax we'll use for entering commands is the same. I've covered each install method below, so you can just skip straight to the bit that matches your operating system. The Windows install may feel a bit complex if you're not used to it but it really doesn't take long.

To install ffmpeg on a Mac, the easiest way - and what I do - is to first install Homebrew and then type in a command into the Terminal (see below) wait a little while and then ffmpeg is installed.  

The command is brew install ffmpeg

On my Linux machine (on Ubuntu), I just use the standard sudo apt install ffmpeg command in the Terminal (see below), enter my computer password and then wait a short while until ffmpeg is installed.

Windows user? You can ignore this one too

Okay, so you're on Windows and you want to know how to install ffmpeg? Here we go.

This can actually be pretty confusing as there are loads of different instructions online, and lots of different ways you can do it. And then the website and install links can be confusing too if you're new to it. So, if you are new to all this, here's what I recommend. 

• Go to the ffmpeg download page and look for the Windows logo (probably in the 'More downloading options' section). As I write, the Windows logo is the blue and white squares one but this may change in future so, to be clear, it's in the 'Get packages & executable files' section of the download page. 
• At this point things can get confusing because all you might actually want is a familiar .exe file you can click on to download and then run - it's not like this with ffmpeg though. BUT DON'T WORRY! Even though the ffmpeg project only provides source code (you can just ignore the Download Source Code link) there are ready-made exe files to download - see the next step. 
• Now you can go to one of the options for downloading a Windows exe file - and for this you may see a couple of options - I went to the 'Windows builds from gyan.dev' link so I recommend you do too.
• What now? Help! Which one do I download? Why are there so many download options!? What the heck does 'git master builds' mean? Don't worry about all that, just read on.
• Scroll down the page a bit and you should see the release builds section and then one downloadable file called ffmpeg-release-essentials.zip (this is what it was called as of 27 Dec 2021) - when you click to download it I recommend saving it on your C drive in a new folder called ffmpeg, so the save location would be C:\ffmpeg - it doesn't actually matter too much where you save it, just so long as it's on the hard drive of your computer. I just find it easier to save it in a dedicated ffmpeg folder directly in the root of my C: drive.
• Okay, almost there - once it downloads (it's about 77MB) you need to unzip the .zip file and then when you do you'll have a folder called something like ffmpeg-4.4.1-essentials_build. The numbers tell you what version of ffmpeg you have - currently (as of 27 Dec 2021) it's version 4.4.1. 
• Look inside this folder and you'll see some more folders - and if you look inside the bin folder you'll see ffmpeg.exe, ffplay.exe and ffprobe.exe. How do we make ffmpeg actually run though? Well, not by clicking these exe files. See below, we're almost there.
• Since we'll be running ffmpeg from the Windows Command Prompt (see below for an example of what this actually looks like) we first need to tell the Windows operating system where the ffmpeg binary files are (that's why the folder is called bin) so that when we type text into the Command Prompt later on it runs ffmpeg for us. We're almost done - I promise! Read on below.

• Now we need to tell Windows where the ffmpeg.exe file is on our computer by setting the Environment Variable. Enlarge the image below to see screenshots of the steps you need to follow now, as described here: - 1. Start typing environment variable into the Windows search box and then once you see the 'Edit the system environment variables' you can click it. 2. in the System Properties window click Environment Variables... towards the bottom and then 3. With Path selected in the list of System variables, click on the Edit... button at the bottom (this will allow any computer user to use ffmpeg - if you just want to be able to use it on your own Windows user profile you can click the other Edit... button in the User variables section of the window - also making sure Path is selected in the list of variables) then 4. we need to click New and then we paste in the folder location of the ffmpe.exe file on our computer (i.e. the path, hence why we're putting it in the Path section), as in 5. in the image below where I have right-clicked the address bar in Windows explorer and used Copy address as text so that I could paste it in at step 4 (so, I pasted in C:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg-4.4.1-essentials_build\bin as my New Environment Variable path because that's where I put my ffmpeg.exe file). Once we do all this we can click OK until all the windows are closed and then the Environment Variable for ffmpeg will be set and we don't have to do this again! Woo.

We only need to do this once!

Windows Command Prompt (we'll get here soon)

How to set the Environment Variable (on Windows)

2. Check ffmpeg is actually installed

Now we need to open a Terminal or Command Prompt on our computer (in case anyone isn't clear - the thing we type ffmpeg commands into is called the 'Command Prompt' on Windows and the 'Terminal' on Mac or Linux - for some this will be obvious, for others it may be entirely new). On Windows this is easily done - I do it by typing cmd into the search tool in the bottom left of the taskbar and then click where it says Command Prompt - and voila! I see the Command Prompt window - all black and shiny and empty. It's also very easy on Mac and Ubuntu.

To check whether ffmpeg is actually installed on your computer just type the following text into the Command Prompt or Terminal window (note the dash before version here - this is a common feature of typing ffmpeg commands).

ffmpeg -version (there is no space between the '-' and 'version')

If you've installed ffmpeg correctly, you'll see some results telling you the ffmpeg version on your computer and lots of other stuff that may mean nothing to you. If you're on Windows and you get an error at this stage, just double check that you set the correct folder path for the Environment Variable at the step above. You can see that on one of the computers I did this on, I'm using version 4.2.3.

May I ask when the fun begins?

Okay, ffmpeg is installed so that's quite enough of that. Let's have some fun now!

3. Let's grab some image files we'll use to make the videos

I've created and shared some image sequences we can use to make videos from. There are two folders of images at the link below that we'll use here (I've added other image sets for you to play with afterwards). One is individual frames of a flight from London to New York and one is from London to Rome. In both folders you will just see a series of png image files. I made both of these using QGIS Atlas and you can find out more about how to do that in this QGIS training workbook I put together. 

Content folder

The lhr-jfk folder has 758 individual map frames so it's bigger in terms of file size and will produce a longer animation, whereas the lhr-rome folder has 161 images and is smaller and will make a smaller animation. But I have shared both of them so you can play around with them as you please. You can use either, or both - it's up to you. 

The easy way to get the files is just to click on the lhr-jfk.zip and download it and then the lhr-rome.zip and download it. Note: I mean it's quickest to download the already-zipped folders rather than trying to download the unzipped image folders.

Once you download the folders (and unzip them), you'll see lots of individual map files - I made these in QGIS and have named all the files sequentially with padded zeros - e.g. 001.png, 002.png and so on. This makes the animation process with ffmpeg a bit simpler.

A snapshot of some of the lhr-jfk png files

I've also shared a txt file with ffmpeg commands that you can use to copy and paste stuff.

4. Let's run some commands in ffmpeg

At this stage I normally like to use a blank text document (e.g. Notepad on Windows) as a kind of intermediate copy/paste text editor so that I can be sure I've typed things correctly and can edit stuff there before pasting it or typing it into the Command Prompt or Terminal window to run a command. But of course just do what suits you best - this is just how I like to work.

Okay, so let's make a video in a couple of simple steps.

4.1. We need to make sure that the Command Prompt/Terminal is working in the correct folder. In Windows we can just type cd followed by the path of where our image files are - like in the example below where I have navigated to my lhr-jfk images folder

Copy the folder path with a right-click

cd C:\Users\XPS13\Downloads\lhr-jfk (I'm using this file path because that's where I saved the lhr-jfk image folder on my computer - you'll just need to type cd followed by the file path of the location you saved the images to)

Note that if you downloaded images to an external hard drive with a drive letter like G or F or something else, then you don't use cd to change hard drive location, you just type in the drive letter followed by a colon (e.g. f:) and then within an individual drive you can used the cd command followed by a file path to navigate to the correct folder.

Now we're ready to roll

On Mac or Linux we can just right-click a folder and choose to open a Terminal at that folder's location and we're all set. 

4.2. Look at the command below and then read the explanation. After that you can just copy and paste it into the Command Prompt/Terminal on your own computer and it will create a video from the png file I've given you. This may look utterly baffling right now, but that's totally fine. It will become clearer.

ffmpeg -r 30 -i %03d.png -c:v libx264 -s 1920x1080 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p flight-30-30.mp4

Explanation

The ffmpeg bit just means we're telling the computer to use ffmpeg.

The -r 30 bit means the input frame rate is 30 frames per second.

the -i %03d.png bit tells ffmpeg what the inputs are - in this case it is a series of sequentially-named png files with numerical names padded with zeros. That's why it says %03d.png - if we had files name 00001.png, 00002.png and so on then we'd use %05d.png

the -c:v libx264 bit tells ffmpeg to use the libx264 encoder. What? Just know that this will work and it works well.

the -s 1920x1080 bit is about the size of our video. Here I've used the standard 16:9 aspect ratio screen size of 1920x1080, even though the files I gave you are only 1020x583 pixels in size. But as you will see this doesn't matter - you could replace this with 1020x583 and see if it looks different. Just note that if you put in a dimension that isn't divisible by 2, you'll probably get an error message. Best to use even numbers here. You can just add or subtract pixel values by 1 so they are both even.

the -r 30 bit is the output frame rate. You don't have to enter this - ffmpeg will default to 30 if you don't but I like to include both input and output frame rate. This can be useful for low frame rate videos when, for example, you want Twitter to play them properly.

the -pix_fmt yuv420p bit relates to pixel format and all you really need to know is that this works and is a good choice. If you don't include it, ffmpeg will still produce a file but it may not actually play.

the flight-30-30.mp4 bit is the output file name - what our final mp4 file will be called. I've just called it flight-30-30.mp4 because this tells me the video is a video of a flight with an input and output frame rate of 30 frames per second. Call it whatever you want, but it's a good idea to give it a descriptive name that has some clue to what's in the file. I output the file to the mp4 format but you can export to all sorts of video formats, including mov, avi, wmv and many more. To do that you'd just write flight-30-30.mov instead of using flight-30-30-mp4.

Okay, so go ahead and paste the command below into the Command Prompt or Terminal and hit enter and then look in the same folder as your image files for the resulting video. See below for my screenshot before I hit enter. 

ffmpeg -r 30 -i %03d.png -c:v libx264 -s 1920x1080 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p flight-30-30.mp4

I've highlighted the different parameters here

Once you hit enter it will run for a little while, anyone walking past your computer will see complicated text scrolling down and think you're a coding genius, and then a few seconds later you'll see a mp4 video file in your working folder (this should be the same folder where all the images are). 

Is this The Matrix, or what?

And here's the video it produced - note that instead of the hundreds of megabytes of images we originally had, the video file size is very small - 693KB for mine.

5. Experiment with different settings

What now?

Well, I think it might be enjoyable to experiment a little, particularly because an input frame rate of 30 gives a pretty slow flight from London to New York (less so with London to Rome). If you're using the London to New York files, try this command to increase the flight speed (note that it's the input frame rate that determines the speed)

ffmpeg -r 120 -i %03d.png -c:v libx264 -s 1920x1080 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p flight-120-30.mp4

Adjust the input -r frame rate (that's the -r parameter just after ffmpeg) and just experiment with the video size settings too if you like - but ideally keep it in the 16:9 aspect ratio and make sure you use even numbers for the -s size parameters. 

Let's say you want to have the flight arrive in New York or Rome and then have the video pause for two seconds. How might you do this? Well, once we have our initial video, the command below will do the trick - and you can adjust the number to increase or decrease the pause at the end. Just replace input-video.mp4 with the video you want to add the pause to and then replace output-video-with-pause.mp4 with your new file name.

ffmpeg -i input-video.mp4 -vf tpad=stop_mode=clone:stop_duration=2 output-video-with-pause.mp4

Want to reverse your video? Fine, try the command below (again, replace the input and output file names with your own). The -vf reverse command is the bit that reverses the video. In this instance, vf stands for video filter and you can always search for other ffmpeg video filters and try them too.

ffmpeg -i original-video.mp4 -vf reverse reversed-video.mp4

Planes don't generally fly backwards of course, but this technique can come in handy.

Finally, let's say you want to convert one of your new videos to another format, you can do this:

ffmpeg -i original-video.mp4 new-video-format.mov

How about a gif? Well, that's a bit more tricky. If you just do the same as above but use .gif as the output file type then ffmpeg will create a gif but it won't look good at all. Then if you search the internet on how to do it, you'll probably end up lost for days. 

So, to avoid any further pain, try the command below - replacing the input video file name with the one you want to convert - and see below for the resulting 1MB gif. Note I have used 960 as the image width in the scale= parameter below but you can always experiment with another value - bigger or smaller.

ffmpeg -i flight-90-90.mp4 -vf "fps=30,scale=960:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" -loop 0 flight-90-90.gif

Making gifs with ffmpeg can be quite confusing!

6. Some tips, notes etc

How to get good at this kind of stuff? Well, a lot of Googling and reading things on Stack Exchange and random blogs is the way to go mainly. But I'd also recommend trying to get to grips with one or two basic commands - like the ones above - by changing the settings and seeing what happens when you edit different parameters.

I'll end with a list of tips that I find useful.

• If you're making a map and then plan to make it an animated mp4 or gif, then it's a good idea to think about where the file will end up so that you can plan ahead - e.g. does it need to be screen size like 1920x1080, does it need to be square, does it need to be a specific colour? Will the play and pause controls obscure any important bits of the video? I'd really just recommend thinking backwards from the end use before you begin.
• If you're exporting map frames from QGIS Atlas then you can easily export the files with numeric names, padded with zeros. That's what I normally do, by using an expression-based file name on export - as shown here, and see screenshot below: lpad(@atlas_featurenumber,3,0)
• Save your ffmpeg commands in a text file and make a note of what they do. Use ffmpeg as a video converter if you ever need to convert, say, a mov file to an mp4. I've added a text file with commands to the Content folder so feel free do use this too.
• Remember that there are loads of ways of doing things in computerland. There isn't normally one single, best way. There may be better ways than those I have shown you here, but these methods work well. However, from time to time things change with ffmpeg and sometimes you may need to do a bit more Googling.
• Want to learn more about ffmpeg? Then why not take a proper course on Udemy - I like this one.
• Want to extract a single frame from a video, as a png, at 8 seconds into a video? This will work: ffmpeg -ss 00:00:08 -i flight-30-30.mp4 -frames:v 1 out1.png (as with all examples here, you can replace the name of the input file after the -i parameter with the name of your own input file, and the name of the output file to whatever you want to call it)
• Want to extract a 4 second section from a longer video, starting at 2.5 seconds into the video and ending at 6.5 seconds? Try this command: ffmpeg -i flight-90-90.mp4 -ss 00:00:02.500 -to 00:00:06.500 -c copy cut-4-sec.mp4
• Note that in the example above, the format for time is hh:mm:ss.sss where there is a dot rather than a colon between the seconds and milliseconds units.

This makes the process much smoother

• What else? Probably the most important things in all of this are a) making sure you have ffmpeg installed properly and b) that you take some time to play around with a command that works and then change the settings to see what it does.
• You don't have to use a sequentially-named list of files, but if you don't then ffmpeg may not include files after a gap - e.g. if you run the command to create a video on a folder with files 001.png, 002.png, 003.png and then 007.png you'll just get a video with the first three files. You can search online for how to get round this.
• Want to add a bit of visual 'noise' to a video? Try this (may be a bit slow) ffmpeg -i flight-30-30.mp4 -vf noise=c0s=60:c0f=t+u noise.mp4
• How about when you want to add some audio to a video you've made - like if you have an mp3 file you want to add as music? Well, that's fairly simple and you can do it like this: ffmpeg -i input-video.mp4 -i input-audio.mp3 -map 0 -map 1:a -c:v copy -shortest video-with-audio.mp4 - and note that -shortest will trim the video to the duration of the shorter file - so if you have a 5 second video and only 3 seconds of audio, the video file will only be 3 seconds long. You can remove -shorten if you don't want this to happen.
• Other tips? Just spend some time searching, but this is a good place to start. 
• Sometimes animated maps are nice, sometimes they are a bit weird and sometimes they can be confusing - so just use your judgement and have fun!

This ended up a bit longer than expected but I'm hoping you may find it useful - I know I will when I inevitably forget some of this and have to come back here to remember. If you spot any errors or have any questions, just get in touch.

Read more About FFmpeg.

Postscript for geo nerds

Why do this? Well, it can be useful if you want to show how things change over time or space or when you are looking to emphasise movement or growth or change of any kind. Also, since we are not restricted to flat, paper maps like in the olden days it's sometimes interesting - and useful - to use animation. People have been doing this for decades and probably most famously Waldo Tobler in the 1960s and early 1970s, as in this video put online by Matthew Wilson. 

And, of course, the 1970 Tobler paper in which the famous 'first law of geography' is stated is actually called 'A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region' so I thought it would be useful to help demonstrate one way to make a 'computer movie' today - hence this ffmpeg post. I met Waldo in sunny Santa Barbara back in 2013 (and before that he was a reviewer on one of my papers) and he explained some of how they used to do things - so ffmpeg is incredibly easy by comparison!

Anyway, about the 'first law of geography' thing - in a follow up collection of papers more than three decades after the original piece, Tobler wrote 'I was just having fun' in relation to some of the work reported in the original 1970 paper when he stated the 'first law'. This is the final section of text from the 2004 paper and I think it's quite interesting what he says, including the bit on diversity of viewpoints, and also on having fun with animations. 

It's also a good way to learn stuff, in my opinion, which is partly why I do this blog and tweet map stuff. For me, despite all the noise, acrimony, animosity and general shenanigans on twitter, the contributions of so many people in geo, data, viz and other fields have led me to contemplate many ideas and references with which I was previously unfamiliar so my hope is that in sharing some of what I know, others may find it useful in ways that I couldn't contemplate myself. But yeah, I was mainly just having fun making an animation.

Tobler, 2004, p. 308

All English Premier League Grounds in 60 Seconds

I've been thinking a lot about information design, urban density and mapping things in context lately as part of my day job so I thought I'd experiment with all these things using an interesting example. To cut a long story short, I took Ordnance Survey data, extracted all 20 Premier League grounds, edited them slightly to match what's on the ground and then did some mapping. The results are shown below for all 20 teams (as of the 2019-20 season), starting with a gif and followed by some further explanation. All you need to know for now is that the main image in each graphic shows the stadia at the same scale as the rest and the little stadium silhouettes at the bottom are all shown at the same scale as well so you can make comparisons between the size of different grounds. I've made all files (including geo files of the stadia) available on this page.

Three seconds per frame, 60 seconds in total - mp4 here

I've always been interested in cities, urban history, football, deprivation street patterns and that kind of thing - and how they all interact - so this seemed like an interesting way to look at it. I did map this before in relation to deprivation but this post is just about showing each ground in its local context - all at the same scale and with just a little bit of additional information for each one.

What I've attempted here is to produce a set of individual images and a gif (I also did an mp4 version) that loops through each ground, gives some basic information about each, shows where it is in England and also shows you how it compares in size and local context to all the others. I've added in some street names but not all, because that makes it far to busy and harder to read. 

I've been to a few of these grounds to watch a match - most recently to Goodison - and I used to drive past Old Trafford almost every day on my way back from work but for lots of others I'm not familiar with them so I wanted to produce a set of simple visuals that clearly shows each ground in context. I really find some of the older ones interesting, the way they are packed tightly into their surroundings - like Anfield. But this was really an experiment in layout and map design more than anything else; I just used this dataset as it was interesting.

As for the colours along the bottom, I used the colours for each team on their official website, though for some there are more than one and for at least one (e.g. Man City) I used a darker one so it would show up better on the stadium silhouette. 

And, oh yes, I was probably thinking about this topic because for the first time in a decade Sheffield will have a team in the Premier League (just not the one in my neighbourhood!).

You can find all the original files - 20 high resolution images plus a gif and an mp4 - here.

Data sources: for the club information it was a mix of Wikipedia and the Premier League website. For the outlines of the grounds I extracted these - then edited them - from Ordnance Survey's OpenMap Local product. The background imagery is Google satellite view. The street names are also from Ordnance Survey but I extracted these from the OS Open Zoomstack local roads layer and then symbolised them just to show a few of the road labels. I thought this was important given the significance of some local roads and how several grounds are named after them - or parts of grounds are. 

Software: I did the mapping in QGIS 3.4, I created the gif with GIMP, and the mp4 I made with ffmpeg. For resizing and cropping and otherwise editing the image outputs I used IrfanView. The font is Montserrat, one of the free Google Fonts and a current favourite of mine.

US 2017 Total Solar Eclipse Animation

I've only just started paying attention to the fact that there's a total solar eclipse in the United States on 21 August this year. What made me really take notice were the imaginative, amusing and bizarre maps people have been posting online - all good fun and often pretty interesting too. What seems to me to be missing - and absolutely essential, of course - is an animated eclipse gif showing the path of totality, towns and cities, a bit of terrain and some roads. So, I grabbed the geodata from NASA and spent a couple of hours playing around with it to make this thing you see below. This is an extract of the full file, in gif format. The full gif is over 100MB, so I've created a video file instead for the final file at the end of this post, below - and also posted on twitter. Click an image to see it in full size.

Note the small part of the path of totality in Montana

Nashville looks like the place to be

I also extracted a series of animations covering the whole US, in separate parts, so that the whole of the path of totality has been giffed, as it were. These are pretty big files and if I add them all here not only will it may crash your browser but it will also probably be a bit too bamboozling with all the animations going on at one time. Here's part 1 and part 2 below. The rest I'll keep to myself for now.

Part 1 - at 50 frames per second

Part 2 - also at 50fps

I just did this out of curiosity and to learn a bit more about the event. I thought it would be interesting to see for myself where the eclipse will go. I remember here in the UK back in 1999 when we had a total eclipse, but I didn't manage to get down to Cornwall to see it properly. Just take a look at this video to see how long ago this now seems. I was in Glasgow at the time and although it didn't get fully dark it was pretty interesting and the birds were very confused. Also, if I didn't do an eclipse map now I might never remember again. The next total eclipse in the UK isn't until 2090 and I just get the feeling I won't be on here making animated gifs of it then.

Notes: mapping software was QGIS 2.14, using the Atlas function to extract the frames for the gif. I used the NASA shapefiles to show where the path of totality and centre line are. I added some place names, roads and US boundary and state lines from Natural Earth and I also added an ESRI shaded relief base layer to give more of sense of the underlying physical geography. I patched the gif together in GIMP and animated the movement of the sun across the land using the vertices of the eclipse centre line. I've added a little glowing corona round the black dot, which is of course supposed to represent the sun.

There were about 1800 points in the original NASA eclipse path file so I used every second one to generate the animation because it still creates a reasonably smooth image. For a proper set of scientific maps, I suggest you check out the NASA Total Eclipse pages, as they are full of great information and maps. They also have an animated gif.