Why the map has no streets, and when that matters
Almost every map on the web is assembled from tiles served by a third party, which means an API key, a rate limit, an account, and every pan and zoom you make being a request to somebody else's server. This tool does none of that. The basemap is Natural Earth vector data — public domain, no attribution required — bundled with the page: 241 country outlines and 7,343 populated places, about 55 KB for the base outline over the wire.
The upside is real. The map works with no key and no quota, your itinerary never leaves the device, and the graphic look — flat land shapes, clean coastlines, a glowing route — is the look these videos actually use. The downside is equally real and worth stating plainly: there are no streets, no buildings and no satellite imagery. At the scale of a city block there is nothing to see. If your route is a walk through Rome, use a tool built on tiles instead.
Where this shape of map is the right one: flights between countries, a rail trip across a continent, a road trip between cities, an expedition, a tour, a shipping route. Anything where the story is the geography at country scale rather than the turn-by-turn.
Great circles, and why your flight bends
The first thing people query about an animated flight map is why the line curves. It curves because that is the shorter path. The shortest route between two points on a sphere is a great circle, and any flat map has to distort the globe to exist at all — on the Mercator projection used here, a great circle shows up as an arc bending toward the nearer pole.
This is not decoration. London to Tokyo really does pass close to the Arctic, and a straight line drawn on a flat map between those two cities is a materially longer route that no airline flies. Flights and ferries in this tool follow great circles; trains, cars, buses, bikes and walks draw straight, because a train does not take the polar route and pretending otherwise would look wrong.
The related problem is the antimeridian — the line at 180° where a flat map's left and right edges meet. A naive renderer draws Tokyo to Los Angeles backwards across Asia, Europe and the Atlantic, because it only knows that one longitude is +139 and the other is −118. Here the whole trip's longitudes are unwrapped into one continuous sequence, and the country outlines are repeated either side of the map, so a Pacific crossing draws across the Pacific and the land underneath it is where it should be.
Choosing a camera
| Mode | What it does | Best for |
|---|
| Grow | Opens tight on the first stop and pulls back as the route accumulates, always framing what has been travelled so far | The default. Most cinematic, and it scales naturally from a two-city hop to a round-the-world trip |
| Follow | Locks the frame onto the moving vehicle at a fixed zoom | Short routes in one region, where a wide frame would leave the map mostly empty |
| Fit | One static frame around the whole route from the first second | Explainers, where the viewer needs to understand the geography rather than be surprised by it |
Zoom easing runs in log space rather than linearly, which is a small detail with a large effect: pulling back from a tight frame to a continental one is a change of many multiples, and interpolating that linearly produces a lurch at the start and a crawl at the end. In log space the motion reads as constant speed.
Making a route video that holds attention
- Six to ten stops is the sweet spot. Fewer than four and there is not much of a journey; past a dozen the pace per leg has to drop so far that individual legs stop registering.
- Set the pace against the platform. 1.2 to 2 seconds per leg suits a feed; slower than 3 seconds and a scrolling viewer is gone before the second city. The estimated total is shown as you build.
- Use the real transport modes. A trip that alternates flight, train and ferry is visually more interesting than one long flight path, and the dashed ferry and walk lines add texture for free.
- Put the hook in the title. "Summer, 2026" says nothing; "17 days, 6 countries, one backpack" says what the video is about while the route is still drawing.
- Export vertical first. 9:16 is where this format lives. If you want a second version for YouTube, change the format and export again — the trip, colours and pacing carry over.
Your trip is saved, so the next one is quick
Stops, transport modes, style, colours and pacing are kept in this browser. Come back after the next leg of a trip, add the city, and re-export — which is the workflow this is built around, because a trip is rarely finished the first time you make a video about it. Nothing is tied to an account and nothing is stored on a server; clearing site data clears the trip.
One honest limitation to plan around: recording happens in real time, so a 20-second video takes 20 seconds to produce and the tab needs to stay visible while it does. Browsers throttle background tabs hard, and the result would stutter. If the tab was hidden during a recording, the tool says so rather than handing you a bad file without comment.