paper_mills_rational


 * RATIONALE for P3 Paper Mills**

So basically for the final project I decided to do something related to the environment as it is something that I feel strongly about.

Here's the basic run through of the slide/flash and how it makes sense.

The top left is a legend, telling you about the different elements of the flash. This is basically a graph of time vs trees, and paper mill vs trees. If the graph was indeed complete. The buttons (paper icon) at the bottom would guide you through the years, starting from 1900's. The data I collected for this wasn't as specific as what I wanted to show, so from different sources I tried to make a good guess of what the numbers/data would be like. From research I do know that in the year 2010, there may possible be over 700 paper mills in the larger provinces. A few years back we're at around 400. Also, there are approximately 700 trees in an acre of land/forest. So that explains why each paper mill icon represents 100 mills, and each tree 5000 trees. Since there is so much land, and so many trees harvested per year.

I also picked out the three provinces in Canada with the most number of paper mills to graph, which explains the size of the land/color. Quebec has the most trees harvested/paper mills, then comes Ontario, lastly British Columbia.

As you go throught the timeline, you can see the increase of paper mills. You can also click on the mills (I've only set up Quebec's mills to be clickable), You take a closer look at that provinces paper mills. Clicking on the mills again will show you how many trees are clearcutted, and how many are harvested a comparison, to sort of give a ratio to the viewer.

Playing around with Processing, I tried to get a grasp of changing scale of triangular forms (to imitate trees), colors, dimensions at which you'd view the graph at and rollovers. The one I had the most fun with was this drawing one, where i managed to change the circle output into triangular lines.

I wanted to animate the transition between how the tree's become logs, they were to kind of vanish then logs would pop up from the base like groundhogs or something. I really liked how LinnaXu from the other class did hers, it made it hard for me to think of ways to make ours different. I've seen too many people in the class doing their's on a map, so I tried to stay away from a map-like appearance.