The Mississippi River at Memphis

Is it possible to use a map animation to help visualize changes in the channel of the Mississippi River at Memphis? These maps from 1927 to 1986 show how much the Mississippi River has changed course even over a short span of time.

For this project, Erin has created maps of water and land for each of the six dates. Your task is to color these maps and assemble them into an animation.

For this project you will use Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe ImageReady to create the animation.

Note: At the moment, you must view this page and the animations with Internet Explorer. Otherwise the Windows Media Player will not open correctly.

Step 1:	Download and open animation.psd in Photoshop.
	Click here to locate the PhotoShop design file. , click your right mouse button over the file name and "Save Target As". Save the file to the scratch disk (D:) or to your zip disk.
	When the "Download complete" is finished, close the dialogue box. (The Photoshop file cannot be opened directly from the Web. It must be opened from Photoshop).
	Now launch Photoshop from the Start Bar. Click here to see launch of Photoshop.
	When the Media Player appears, you will see a "Windows Media Player Error" box. Close this box. It only appears because we are not using audio.
	If you want to see the Windows Media Player in Full Screen press Alt + Enter.
	Pressing Alt + Enter will get you back to the normal view.
	In Windows Media Player, the space bar allows you to stop and start the animation. Also, if you press the right mouse button over the animation, you will get a list of control features.

Step 6:	What to do next:
	Use your last name as the filename for your animation (i.e. "baumanassign6.gif").
	Move this file to a folder called "animation" on your zip disk.
	Open Internet Explorer. Choose: File -- Open and browse to your animation file. You can now view the animation. For those who like to publish web pages, this .gif animation can be published just like an image .gif.
	Hand in your zip disk to Vanessa by Friday 5pm, November 21.

Mississippi at Memphis in 1927	Mississippi at Memphis in 1955	Mississippi at Memphis in 1960
Mississippi at Memphis in 1965	Mississippi at Memphis in 1973	Mississippi at Memphis in 1986

Step 2:	Color layers of the map:
	Pick new foreground and background color
	after that
	Select area and fill with new color

Step 4:	Assemble frames for animation:
	Adding frames and assigning layers to frames
	after that
	Setting the timing of frames

Step 3:	Switch to the animation program:
	Launch ImageReady

Step 5:	Save animation in .gif format:
	Saving animation

The Mississippi River at Memphis: A Map Animation