Producing animated graphs from Stata without having to learn any specialized software

Much interest has been focused on animated graphical displays of data in recent years, although this mostly involves some expertise with specialized software and programming. There is a lack of simple tools for data analysts to use to produce animations. In this presentation, I will show how movie files can be produced as stop-frame animations using Stata graphs as the building blocks. This approach is extremely flexible, and I will give some examples, including morphing from start to finish locations and the (ab)use of animation, color, and sound for emphasis. Some potential applications for teaching will be discussed. The principle of creating a sequence of transitional images through a loop, then calling the freeware, open-source ffmpeg software via winexec or shell will be explained with do-file examples. For repeated applications, the whole process can be contained within an ado-file, which raises the possibility of interactive websites with Stata, producing bespoke animations.