Introduction

Here we will explore what is involved in creating animations (i.e., movies). Of course, an animation is nothing more than a series of individual images played back in an orderly fashion. Here, these images will have been created with GMT. A GMT movie is made with the movie module that takes care of all the book-keeping of making a movie (advancing frame counters, converting each plot to a raster image, assembling the images into a movie). The user is left to focus on the creation of a main frame script (that will have access to special variables to know which frame it is as well as user-defined data) and optional scripts that prepares files for the movie, lays down a constant background plot, and appends a constant foreground plot. The movie module explains the available options and gives simple examples. Below are more advanced movie examples. You can generate anything from tiny animated gif files for your PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations or a full-featured movie with thousands of frames at HD or 4k resolution. Note: Several of the movie examples have been purposefully made simpler by selecting lower frame rates and coarser grids so that the automatic building of the documentation (which includes the animations) does not take excessive time.