I made the initial animation in Blender, using the wave and displace modifiers and some postprocessing in the node editor. Then I imported the frames into After Effects and did a little more processing (added grain, some color adjustments). I exported the frames as a PNG sequence and then converted them to a GIF using ImageMagick on the command line:
This is a rough, experimental proof of concept showing how an assertion-based genealogy app could work. The basic idea is that you type in the facts you know (usually from a record you’ve found), and the app pieces together the people and relationships. Here’s the video:
And a screencap:
Notes:
I’m not very good at After Effects. (Thus the oversize mouse cursor I threw together, the less than ideal pacing, etc.)
Overall, the idea of assertion-based genealogy continues to intrigue me. It feels simpler — I add a source and list the facts/hypotheses found in it, and the system takes care of linking it all up.
Toward the end of the video, the mouse clicks on the first fact and it dims, and Domenico and Mariantonia disappear from the chart area. The idea here is similar to toggling a layer’s visibility in Photoshop — disable a fact to see what the chart looks like without those conclusions.
I didn’t mock this up, but I envisioned the right (empty) sidebar being used for analysis, somewhat like my Family Analysis prototype, and for flagging errors (a father born after his child is born, a mother dying two years before she gives birth, etc.).
