Sam: Just dive in and play around with it! Zoom in on any place in the world that interests you and think about how you would try to tell a story about it. Mike: Lastly, any advice for someone getting started with Earth Studio? I’ve usually kept my animations at a pretty high altitude, but would love to dive in even closer and explain a story about a specific building or city. Sam: I’d like to take more advantage of the 3D rendered spaces. Mike: Are there other features you want to try out that you haven’t already? Adding this ability to Earth Studio would be absolutely incredible. This is super-useful for our videos, which use a lot of historical comparisons. Sam: I use Google Earth Timelapse a lot because it lets me look at satellite photos back in time. Mike: If we could add a feature to Earth Studio that would make your day, what would it be? In the beach story, our video producer, Carlos Waters, sent Earth Studio animations to a drone operator to pre-visualize flight paths. Sam: There’s Why this black hole photo is such a big deal, and also, The Problems with Rebuilding Beaches. Mike: Any other stories where you used Earth Studio?
It immediately opened the door to trying a lot of cool things because I was comfortable using it. Sam: I can’t overemphasize how excited I was to see that Earth Studio used the same keyframe process as After Effects. Mike: What were your first impressions of the tool? They’re an easy way to add a lot of dynamism and production value to our animations, which goes a long way to keep the viewers interested. I also love the orbit and spiral functions. It’s essentially the same as Adobe After Effects, which is the program we use to animate our videos, so it was super-easy to jump in and use Earth Studio. Sam: By far the most useful feature is the keyframe design. Mike: What Earth Studio features are most useful - or fun? These kinds of visuals just add so much dynamism and production value to the videos - without a ton of effort. Gas station in Brasilia that was used to launder money. It added really powerful visual evidence to the story. I zoomed in on a bunch of them to show the viewer that this power plant was shut down, this nuclear energy plant closed, and this river-dredging project had to lay off hundreds of workers. Instead of simply creating a boring list or a table, I showed the real projects themselves using Google Earth Studio. When the scheme was uncovered, it shut down dozens of enormous projects all over Latin America, and thousands of people were laid off.Īfter I explained how the scheme worked and why it became such a big deal, I really needed to show where these projects were and what they looked like.
The best example is a story I did about Brazil’s Car Wash scandal, a massive corruption scheme where governments colluded with oil and construction companies to inflate Latin American infrastructure project prices and embezzle huge amounts of public money. But it’s not a complete explanation if I don’t show what these policies, histories, and forces look like on the ground. A lot of my Vox Atlas stories are explainers about geopolitical events, so I spend a lot of time zoomed out in “world map” mode, moving from country to country, and region to region. Sam: Personally, I love the close-up details I can show with Google Earth. Mike: Why do you like using Earth Studio? The Event Horizon Telescope : showing where two of the eight ground-based radio telescopes are. So if we’re not explaining a current news story, then we’re finding the answers to really interesting questions that you didn’t realize you wanted to ask - like how Leonardo da Vinci created a “satellite map” in 1502. We use this same approach to cover topics like science, culture, tech, and history. Over at Vox Video we do the same thing, but we have the luxury of also showing you what a story is about, how it’s unfolding, and why it’s important. Vox is all about explaining the news, which means we bring context to the really fast-moving headlines you see every day.
#Zoom earth animation softwre series#
Sam: Thanks, Mike! I’m a video journalist who produces a series called Vox Atlas, which uses maps to explain international news stories and geopolitics. Mike: Hi Sam! What do you do at Vox Video? Michael Tavendale, Program Manager for Earth Studio, interviewed Sam Ellis, Senior Producer at Vox, to find out how the tool brings stories involving spatial data to life. How Vox Video uses Earth Studio for dynamic visual storytellingĮditor’s note: Vox Video is using Google Earth Studio to add animated 3D maps to its storytelling videos on Vox.com.
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