Death Statistics in England and Wales - Postscript

In the last post about death statistics I put in an animated GIF that I had created using a combination of Excel and GIMP.

Quite why I did it this way I don't know. It took hours (probably) to adjust the chart, copy it to paint, save it and then copy it as a layer to GIMP.

I've since discovered a few websites detailing how to create exactly the same thing using R. Googling 'animated gif R' gives, almost, thousands of examples. I now realise quite how stupid I was.

Below is the script that I used:

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death <- read.table("death.txt",header=TRUE)

#summary(death)

library(ggplot2)

library(Cairo)

for(i in 2:49){

  dp <- ggplot(data=death,aes(x=Age,y=death[,i])) + geom_line() + ylim(0,0.05)

  

  if(i<10){

    ttle <- paste('plot0',i,'.png',sep="")

  } else {

    ttle <- paste('plot',i,'.png',sep="")

  }

  CairoPNG(filename=ttle,width=480,height=480,dpi=300)

  #png(filename=ttle)

  print(dp)

  dev.off()

}

shell('"C:/Program Files/GraphicsMagick/gm.exe" convert -delay 15 -loop 0 plot*.png death.gif')

shell('"C:/Program Files/FFMpeg/bin/ffmpeg.exe" -start_number 02 -i plot%02d.png -vcodec libx264 death.mp4')

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The script loads in the data which is arranged as a table with age as the rows, year as the columns and deaths as a proportion of the total.

It then loads the required libraries.

Lines 7-20 do the work of creating the plots. These are saved as PNG files. Two things to note:

1. I've set the y axis scale to run from 0->0.05. This is to keep the axes on a consistent scale.
2. To make sure that the PNG files are ordered correctly I've had to zero pad the numbers for 2-9.

The work of creating the animated GIF is done by GraphicMagick. You can also use ImageMagick.

I won't go into any more detail as other sites give much better information. There's no point copying it.

The last line uses ffmeg to create a movie from the plots. This was inspired by www.animatedgraphs.co.uk.

Below is the resultant GIF:

The whole process takes seconds - once the script is written.