About Map Animation
A journey drawn across a hand-painted watercolor map. The camera flies between real coordinates, punches down into your footage at each stop, and the frame settles into a postcard beside its pin — then the whole cut re-stages itself as a 9:16 reel, so one project gives you both deliverables. You describe the route; your AI agent builds it, and the map is real cartography, not an illustration of one.
What your AI agent can build here
The template seeds the map-animation skill, so any AI agent working in a project made from it already knows the whole format:
- A real route — stops in travel order with their true longitude and latitude, an inked arc between them, and numbered pins. The camera, the tiles and the distance on the end card are all derived from those coordinates, so the geography is correct rather than decorative.
- Camera flights — a punch-in from travelling altitude onto each place, a hold while the postcard lands, and a lifted arc onward to the next pin. Hand-offs are continuous by construction; the skill covers how to prove it frame by frame.
- Footage at each stop — your clip plays full-frame, then a wet-pigment smudge dissolves it into the map and the same frame becomes a print: paper, caption, date stamp and a handwritten note that types itself on.
- Watercolor cartography — Stamen Watercolor tiles cached locally, layered z3→z6 and cross-faded by zoom so the map stays sharp from whole-world down to a single valley. Renders are offline and deterministic once cached.
- Both aspect ratios — the 16:9 cut, then a morph into 9:16 that re-frames the map, re-crops each clip around its subject, and re-stages the titles. No second project, no re-export.
- Sound — the standard audio loop: a calm bed under the whole film, soft SFX on the pin drops and card landings, and narration if the story needs it.
Where it fits
- Travel and trip recaps — the obvious one: three stops, real footage, a route that draws itself.
- Expansion and launch maps — new offices, new regions, new markets, in the order they happened.
- Supply chain and logistics — where a product is made, shipped and sold, with a real clip at each site.
- Tour and event dates — cities in sequence, each with a postcard from the night.
- Teaching and explainers — migrations, trade routes, expeditions, campaigns: any story whose spine is places connected in order.
- Field reports and case studies — a customer map where each pin opens onto footage from that site.
A stop with no clip still works — the camera punches in and the postcard lands, holding on the map — so a route can mix filmed places with ones you only have a name for.
How to work with it
- Use this template and give the project a name.
- Ask your agent for the film you want — "a 60-second trip film across Lisbon, Marrakesh and Cairo, one clip per stop, dates in May".
- The agent looks up the real coordinates, caches the map tiles for that route, and cuts your clips to the beat. Drop footage into
assets/clips/ first, or let it fetch stock.
- Scrub the stage while it works; the preview catches up within a beat.
- Add music and narration when the visuals settle, then export — both the wide cut and the reel come out of the same render.
Exports run headlessly too: coa render <project> --preset 1080p60 renders the whole film from a script or CI, no editor window.
The bundled sample is a finished film made exactly this way — open it as a project to see the route data, the timeline and the audio wired together.