This assignment requires us to create a looping animation base on the same set of data that we were using in the previous assignment. But instead of just showing what the data means, we need to dig into the cause of that set of data and show the cause instead.
The data that I was previously working was "From 2001 to 2020, New Zealand lost 1.29Mha of tree cover, equivalent to a 11% decrease in tree cover since 2000." Which is basically talking about deforestation.
I asked myself a before further researching on the cause. I asked myself, why does the forest matter to us? Through researches that I have done and base on my own knowledge, the forest is important to us because a forest creates a large carbon tank to store carbon and produce the oxygen we need. It is also important to other problems like desertification, because having a forest will slow down the rate of erosion. Well... these are all effects of deforestation and unfortunately I did not do as much research in my first assignment.
WHAT THEN?
When I actually started moving on to the reason, my approach was really broad. My research was based on the whole world and a little bit on New Zealand. Meanwhile, I searched through Pinterest for photos and concepts that I might want to use as a guide.
I have decided to go for a more 2D, simple kind of style. And the next thing I thought about was what to include in my animation. But my thoughts were still basing on how to show deforestation. Which Caleb reminded me and some other classmates about the WHY? is the key of this assignment. Then I shifted my focus back.
GETTING BACK ON TRACK
After a nice reminder from Caleb, I narrowed my research direction to New Zealand. There are THREE main reasons that New Zealand is having deforestation.
Including:
Expansion of plantation forestry was the single most important driver of recent deforestation
climatic change, volcanism and naturally ignited fires have all been implicated as factors driving Holocene vegetation change in New Zealand
Animal agriculture
Although Caleb and Chandra did give me some ideas on how I can visualise the first reason, I am less interested to work on it, since I feel like animals can give off a more interesting visual.
These are the few sketches I did.
I asked for advice from classmates and Caleb and apparently they feel more interested in the animal agriculture reason as well. So, I started to do more research. I looked up to see what kind of animal agriculture is the most common in New Zealand. It turns out sheep, cow and milk are the winners. Thus, I decided to include them into my animation. (I wanted the horse TT)
GRAPHICS
I started off with the main characters of the animation.
The milk bottle did not look like this at first. Instead, it has words on it. I posted the picture on discord and asked for feedback because I felt like it was a bit off.
I have decided to recolour the milk bottle and also remove the words on it to fit the whole picture better. I asked again when I was confused about the positioning which I got really nice feedbacks from classmates.
More changes has been made to the background after I talked to Krishna and Jacky after showing them my work. Their feedback were briefly about how my current idea cannot really show the linkage between deforestation and animal agriculture which is something I really agree on. I was suggested to change:
Colour scheme
Add more features to relate it back to deforestation
And so it turned out like this:
(I also had the drawings of the trees ready for coding)
I made modifications to the trees later on after receiving comments and questions about why did I chose those trees. I was trying to draw the trees based on the native species in New Zealand but apparently they do not look like them. These following pictures show the version after I modify them. They are based on 5 kinds of trees, including Nikau, Ti Kouka, Kowhai, Rimu and Totara.
CODING
I am very bad at coding. I feel like i just do not have the sense to understand how a code runs no matter how many times one explain to me.
I was very lucky to have Etienne to help me on that.
I attempted to make it more complicated and more close to what I wanted but I failed. I wanted to create a random speed for the trees to fall but it did not work out, so I gave up.