I gave a presentation today at the North American Cartographic Information Society’s annual conference’s Practical Cartography Day. Instead of sharing a text-heavy final slide of resources, I wanted to deliver a simple one-stop location of all the resources. Not just for those who attended the conference, but also for anyone who wants to learn about stepping into the wild world of After Effects.

Presentation

The first resource is the “slides” which is instead a YouTube video of this talk since the nature of my presentation doesn’t make sharing any other way possible. After the live conference talk is uploaded to the NACIS YouTube channel, I will replace this link with that video.

Workflow tools

I shared my workflow in this demo: ArcGIS Pro > Adobe Illustrator using ArcGIS Maps for Adobe > After Effects. Check out the video I listed for the details of this workflow. To open an ArcGIS Pro AIX file, you will want to have the ArcGIS Maps for Adobe tool installed. It is a great tool for people who enjoy using Adobe Illustrator for mapmaking.

Scripting for mapping in After Effects

Nelson Schäfer wrote a wonderful thesis on using scripting for mapping in After Effects in 2021. I referenced this resource in my talk, and wanted to make it available to everyone.

Maps Dot Com

I work at a company with a lot of talented folks who are using After Effects in their map design. Some of those folks work on the Maps.com team, and you can find great inspiration from there and their YouTube Channel.

Some other cool stuff

Charlie Lott has another similar workflow video on YouTube, using a different thematic map as his focus.

I mentioned in my talk that migration maps are a nice case for map animation. Here is a blog post by Warren Davison that focuses on his workflow for bird migration.