So I've got a movie which is a murder mystery in a mansion. Various people go to different rooms at different times. And some of this happens offscreen but is described or implied in later scenes.

I want to make a representation of this that I can scroll through, possibly even synched to the movie. Like I'd want to be able to map an animated map of the mansion and show who is where, when.

Any ideas with what software would be good for this/how should I represent this?

I could start at the end of the movie -> digital representation of timeline of pawns moving about -> movie-synch'd animation, but that'd be a lot of video editing and I don't enjoy that much. I want to be doing as little of that as possible, and as much of automating some representation -> video renderer

which'll probably be little icons moving around a 2D* map

* hopefully.

all the ways I can think of doing this are a little too annoying, and I'm hoping someone has an idea on how to do this that wouldn't horribly suck

@foone it definitely speaks to your audience that a lot of the answers are "write new software", not "use existing animation software" :)

Unfortunately I don't think any newcomer has reached Flash levels of ease of use for "here's a layer with the map. here's a layer with a dot or whatever for each character, keyframed when they change room. autotween if you want to."

But you have Win98 machines, and Flash 4 is probably on the internet somewhere, right? And it'll export to an image sequence