Flash for Animated Crime Maps

This is a earlier example (much earlier- 2002) of using animation to tell a story within a mapping environment. This is a gallery of animated maps showing burglary, assaults, all incidents, and vehicle thefts year-by-year. Also included is an example of an hour-by-hour analysis of traffic collisions.

Methodology
This is completed by exporting individual layers into Macromedia (Now Adobe) Flash. Flash is a perfect medium for this because it is able to handle raster and vectors with different levels of compression. In these (old...) examples, the densities(rasters) are vectorized, reducing the size substantially. What would be a 30-100MB avi file exported from ArcScene is an 80kb swf file.
I teach a class about this, and have since (2005) developed a way to incorporate Modelbuilder to create and symbolize the densities automatically.