 Welcome to this brief introduction to SciAnimator Network Animation. Cytoscape is a tool for doing network visualization, which I have covered in many earlier videos, including this hands-on tutorial on network visualization. If you haven't seen it already, I suggest you go watch it first. The problem is that what we are doing in all of those earlier videos is only to make static images. What if you want to make fancy animated videos? Well, there's an app for that. It's called SciAnimator, and it allows you to keyframe animation, thereby producing videos of your networks. In this video, I'll go over the functionality and interface of SciAnimator, give you some advice on how to make good videos of your networks, and finally, some ideas for how you might want to use it in practice. Let's start with the functionality. The fundamental idea is that you have one network, but multiple different view stage of that network. These are put on a timeline, looking like this. The different views or states of your network is what is called keyframes. And each keyframe holds information about the network layout, the visual style of the network, such as color, size, width, and the viewport of the network, that is, which part is being shown. Keyframe animation morphs between these different states, thereby moving nodes to new locations, interpolating properties like colors and size, fading in and out new nodes and edges, and finally panning and zooming if you've been changing the viewport. You can take the result and export it as a video using a simple dialog box that looks like this. You simply specify the file name, the file format, the frame rate and the resolution, and you export it. I should warn you, though, that export can be rather slow, but once it's exported, playback is fast. Let's continue with some dos and don'ts. The big problem is that it's easy to make a bad video and it's hard to make a good video. Don't make a video with just two keyframes and have everything change between them. The result will look something like this, where everything is moving around and changing colors and fading in and fading out at the same time. Nobody can follow what's going on. Do try to minimize movement. Here, I still only have two keyframes, but because things are staying still, it's much easier to follow what's going on. But we can do better than that. By having more keyframes, you can separate out the changes. This video, you now have the new nodes first appearing, then the nodes changing color, and finally, nodes disappearing. That makes it even easier to follow. When animating, you really want to minimize complexity, because the viewer has much less time for capturing what's going on than when you have a static image that you can look at for as long as you want. On top of that, you of course want to follow good visualization practices, which I've already described in an earlier video on data visualization. Finally, let me give you a few ideas on how you might want to use network animation in your work. Firstly, if you're working on network rewiring, it's very convenient for showing how edges fade in and out, and at the same time move just a few nodes to reflect the rewiring of your network. That will result in a mostly static layout, which makes it quite easy to follow. If you have time course data, for example, from omicsdata, you may want to have a static network layout and simply use dynamic node properties using keyframes to reflect the different time points in your time series. That way you can have changing colors and sizes, reflecting things being up and down regulated or entirely disappearing. You can also use animation to illustrate an analysis. In this case, you might start from a big network, looking something like this big hairball, and then have different analysis steps be different keyframes showing how you get from that to your final much nicer network visualization. Finally, you might want to use animation to make a tour of a large network. In this case, you might have a static network layout and start with a global view of it, then zoom and pan to different clusters and maybe add and remove node labels as you're zooming in and they become readable. That's all I have to say about network animation. If you want to learn more about general ways of how to visualize networks, I suggest you take a look at this presentation next. Thanks for your attention.